The Butterfly Trail, a mixed reality experience with groundbreaking technological elements, was designed by immersive experience studio Pixel Artworks and will debut on September 5 at Outernet London

The ButterflyTrail, a mixed reality experience with groundbreaking technological elements, was designed by immersive experience studio Pixel Artworks and will debut on September 5 at Outernet London.

The Butterfly Trail will lead guests through explorer Professor Peter Pelegrin’s Botanical Workshop and into his Glass House, where they can engage with the experience using only their smartphone’s browser without the need for a specialized gadget, headset, or downloaded mobile app.

An interactive ‘Metamorphosis Machine’ experience that begins with a skills-based slingshot game, designed in conjunction with production studio Aircards on 8th Wall’s WebAR platform, is one of the attraction’s world-first mixed reality moments. The experience begins inside Outernet’s Now Building, which has 2,100 square meters of wrap-around led screens with a 25K native resolution.

After releasing magical AR butterflies from their chrysalises, the audience can activate the Metamorphosis Machine with their smartphone, triggering real-time animations on the machine displayed on the screens. The audience is then immersed in a spectacular mix of rendered and real-time animated content. The rendered and real-time Unreal animations were created by Pixel Artworks, as well as the first-ever communications interface between Unreal and the 8th Wall AR experience, which was developed in collaboration.

The audience can hold a magnificent butterfly in their hand or on their finger thanks to a new WebAR hand-tracking function that Aircards developed. The audience can download and share their experience online or straight to their camera roll thanks to the on-device photograph and video capture of the hand-holding moment.

The 32-channel spatial audio mix in Professor Pelegrin’s Botanical Workshop and The Glass House was produced in collaboration with Gramercy Park Studios. This is Outernet’s most intricate spatial mix to date, and it offers an exciting, enhancing audio for the visual experience.

Additionally, Aircards and PixelArtworks worked together to deploy Metalitix, a spatial analytics platform that tracks visitor behavior both in the real world and online. The information acquired will aid in understanding how users interact with the experience and have an impact on how immersive experiences are developed in the future.

“It’s amazing to think you can step into nature in the heart of London and hold butterflies in your hand,” said Tom Burch, managing director of Pixel Artworks. By introducing such cutting-edge experiential technology to The Butterfly Trail at Outernet, one of the most popular attractions in the UK, we can push the frontiers of creativity and appeal to audiences seeking out fresh, engaging immersive experiences.