The Arcade AR

The Arcade - a fan based AR experience
a project by Next Empire, Woodwork and Antfood

Following the upcoming premier of the second season of Stranger Things - Next Empire, Woodwork and Antfood created this fan based, interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experience. An inter-dimensional portal, built with Apple’s new ARkit, lets users walk into and experience another dimension wherever they are. In this case Stranger Things’ The Upside Down, an alternate reality existing in parallel to the human world. The experience is only released on iOS.

Woodwork, Next Empire and Antfood combined their shared love for Stranger Things with the opportunities of the recent release of Apple’s ARkit to create this fan-based AR experience. One of the most conceptually compelling applications of Apple’s ARkit is the so called portal experience, in which users are able to step into another world. In Stranger Things this other world is The Upside Down, which lends itself extremely well for a portal experience.

To further improve the experience - compared to the currently existing inter-dimensional portals built using ARKit - creators have gone further in terms of quality of visuals, quality of sounddesign and use of binaural audio and the interactiveness with multiple actions triggered on location in the scene and viewing direction. Building a truly unique app, which literally opens The Upside Down anywhere users open the app.