Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness AR
Immersive Web
Project Summary
Create an immersive web-based experience authentic to the bizarre and magical visions presented in the film.
- Create awareness of the Home Entertainment release
- Deliver buzz and sharing with brand evangelists
- Drive sales
The Doctor Strange Augmented Reality Experience let fans open portals into the Multiverse to explore parallaxing 2.5D scenes from the film.
The Magician's Tools
Built just in time to correspond with Disney and Marvel's presence at Comic-Con, this mobile phone experience—part web-based augmented reality and part immersive 2.5D website— allowed fans to conjure several of Doctor Strange's magical portals, each opening into a different unique scene from the Multiverse of Madness. These portals appeared around users in their own space.
In addition to the portals, other magical elements appeared in the user's environment, including the ominous red mists of the Scarlet Witch and broken shards of crystal, frozen in time, reflecting the film's characters (a significant visual motif in the film's key art). The augmented reality portals, crystal shards, and red mists were all executed with custom 3D shaders optimized to run efficiently on standard consumer phone browsers.
Each magical portal to a film location served as a gateway to unlock hidden content showcasing aspects of the film's narrative and its characters. When users chose to enter a portal, their augmented environment was swept away as they entered the dynamic and interactive panoramic scenes.
Deep into the Madness
Three environments were adapted from high-resolution frames of the film, and each deeply layered scene was imbued with subtle movement and visual depth thanks to a parallax motion effects driven by each viewer's movements.
The first portal revealed the Gap Junction, an interdimensional waypoint filled with time-hewed debris, featuring Strange and team standing behind a hatch door acting as a multiversal gateway. Second was Kamar-Taj, the home temple of Earth's sorceror-protectors, located in the mountains of Nepal, and where Strange and his band of guardians stage a desperate magical defense. The final location was Darkhold Castle, an ominous stronghold where a levitating Scarlet Witch, pulsing with antagonistic magical energy, uncovers dark secrets in a Book of the Damned.
Static scenes were broken into parallaxing layers of depth and movement.
A Multitude of Media
In each location, visual effects and memorable details from the iconic set piece locations were complemented with content hotspots, providing impetus for exploration. Filled with sneak peeks at bonus content and clips, the hotspots gave fans a taste of the full range of content available on the Blu-ray and Digital Home Entertainment releases.
Hotspots were also updated with fresh and exclusive content over the course of the campaign—including never-before-seen footage and a Comic-Con message from actor and fan favorite Bruce Campbell.
You can try out the archived experience here.