AR Promotes 5G in South Korea

Gradually, the communication network is moving to the new 5G mobile communication standard. For this reason, market leaders want to switch on a 5G network as quickly as possible. They promote the new communication standard by giving their users different “goodies”. In this case, LG U + has created about a dozen free AR / VR services. One of them were the children’s AR books.

The world is starting to use 5G — a new mobile communication standard. The shift to 5G will seriously affect all mobile technologies, but most of all, according to experts, it will accelerate the development of the Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) market. Unfortunately, the launch of the new technology coincided with a pandemic. This gave the conspiracy theorists a lot of food for thoughts. They intimidated already troubled people and made up lots of negative prejudices. They even have set cell phone towers on fire. In such an extraordinary environment, telecommunications companies had to look for out-of-the-box solutions for 5G promotion. One of such solutions will be discussed in this article.

LG U + plans to gather all co-created AR content in one place, and Google will show it to the users, regardless of their providers or phone manufacturers. If for some reason, there are problems with Google search, content can be accessed through LG U + services.

Even before the signing of this agreement, South Koreans have created about 10 services with free AR / VR content available only to their customers. No wonder children and young people were chosen as the target audience since they simply cannot imagine their life without gadgets, games and social networks.

Online children’s library of 30 AR books was created as well. Actually, such ‘books’ are 3D Augmented Reality animations that can be projected onto any surface. Here is how Andrey Tymoshenko, founder of Live Animations, comments on this format, “When I look at this product, it feels like I get into the fairytale world. Nowadays audiobooks are highly popular in the world. As for adults, they have become a common thing. But what do the kids think about audiobooks? My 6-year-old son refuses to listen to fairy tales in the audio format, as he does not like it. Instead, he really loves it when we read him print books at night; as such books have so many pictures inside. Children’s audiobooks need a completely different approach, for example, they have to include more visualization, vivid scenes, pictures and magic. And this is where #augmentedreality fits the best. I believe that such digital AR books can become a great alternative to already-existing types of children’s audiobooks. “

It was impossible to produce all 30 books from scratch because of the project timeline that LG U+ management had planned. Therefore, the Koreans just decided to buy exclusive rights on BookFul’s ready mobile application and content.

Though the app and the books were localized, still they were not unique, and hence could not completely satisfy a telecommunications giant such as LG U+. That is why they decided to add to the finished AR library two exclusive books specially designed for the South Korean children’s audience. They have chosen Live Animations — the acknowledged expert in AR for children — as the contractor.

After talking everything through, LG U+ settled on the timeless classics fairy tales ‘Cinderella’ and ‘The Three Little Pigs’. Four months were allocated for the implementation of two books. The 16 people have participated in the project on the part of the contractor.

For Live Animations team, both technical and artistic aspects of the project did not cause any difficulties, since the company has vast experience creating AR products for kids and families, including AR books.

According to the company, the only difficulty was the difference between European and Asian mindsets. The thing is that Koreans perceive the tone of the dialogues and the characters themselves in a completely different way. The contractor did not always manage to understand the customers on the spot; also, it was not easy to predict their wishes. As a result, it took two whole months to agree upon the script and the concepts. That was the reason the company faced the second difficulty. They had to create in total 20 minutes of a 3D cartoon and several interactive games in the remaining eight weeks. Considering the fact that 3–5 characters took part in each of the scenes. Therefore, it was not possible to meet the deadlines. Nevertheless, this was the only customer complaint. Here is how the AR Production Manager at LG U+ describes working experience with the contractor: “Live Animations team knew what it was doing. They anticipated everything, and they often came back to me with better ideas. They provided things that I didn’t ask for, and they produced a much better-quality product than we anticipated. I was pleasantly surprised by their willingness to go beyond the scope.”

So far, the finished application has already been downloaded more than 105,000 times, taking into account the fact that it is available only on Google Play and only to LG U + customers.

The peculiarities of Korean work culture

There were no special problems at the script-approval stage. Except for ‘Three Little Pigs’ — the Koreans insisted on a considerable increase of the animated scenes and interactive games. However, the option of increasing the budget was not considered. As a result, we have reached a compromise — we increased the cheap-to-produce audio parts in each scene (the author tells the part of the plot and there is no need to create a whole episode). The story turned out to be more detailed, and at the same time, the timing of the animation did not change.

There were also some funny moments — the company insisted on the young Fairy Godmother in ‘Cinderella’ fairy tale. We tried to convince the customer that this was illogical and not true to the original. That was useless. They wanted her to be young and that is it. In the end, as we understood that we had different points of view, we did it the way they wanted.

In general, it is the cultural background that causes most of the difficulties while working with Asians. However, you can make it easier if you do your homework. For example, when preparing the characters’ sketches, we initially made them a little bit in the anime style. This reduced the number of edits and the time of the characters’ appearance approval.

Although, we had a little fail with the voice acting. Strange as it may seem, our solid experience in creating books for American companies let us down. For them we always create heroes that express emotions with their voices more with restraint rather than loudly. Naturally, we work with people, mainly radio hosts, who do this kind of work. In this case we also hired them. But this time the customer flatly refused to approve the voices. We spent a long time figuring out what they didn’t like and finally realized that emotions had to be much stronger. The hero should sound in such a way that it would be possible to understand whether he is positive or negative, even with closed eyes. When the situation had cleared up, we hired professional actors and closed the issue.

Since LG U + bought ready application in advance there wasn’t the last stage in the project. Due to this the project team consisted of 15 people instead of 30 (the usually needed number of people for such tasks).

Instead of an epilogue

Augmented reality is still an innovative technology that is just beginning to truly conquer the world of marketing and advertising. That is why many companies still do not understand the sequence of steps when implementing projects with AR. Here is our list of the steps as a reminder:

· A customer brief with a general description of the goals and tasks that need to be solved;

· The concept development of an AR product (usually includes brainstorming and team meetings);

· Technical documentation creation. Such documentation includes the project description in all details, with listed stages and defined timing of their implementation;

· AR product creation. Includes scriptwriting, 3D modelling, animating, designing, programming, voice acting, testing and debugging and finally the launch of the product;

· Technical support of the product after its launch, including user support.