On Tuesday the 5th, we had the honor of winning third place in the Interactive category of the Blooloop Innovation Awards for our product “Wander”.
What’s “Wander”?
Wander is a software based solution for designing and activating adventures taking places in themed venues, where thousands of visitors can play at the same time and with multiple days of content dynamically adjusted to their actions.
Once installed in a venue, Wander links multiple physical interactive stations and tracks visitors actions to provide them a personalized, always evolving Story.
Visitors experience
Wander will turn visitors into adventurers, crossing the park in search of clues, rewards or surprises, talking with actors, interacting with props,..living a personalised adventure in an immersive themed environment.
Visitors can actively engage with the adventure and the environment, creating an emotional connection with it.
What’s new
Wander is the first technology capable of industrializing the creation of interactive immersive experiences.
It follows the entire life of the product and facilitates the process: from the design phases to the application in the venue.
Wander allows to:
- Intuitively design enough stories for multiple days of adventures, thousands of players at the same time and an evolving world. The user Interface has been created to be easy to master for a creative team, using classic design tools
- Deploy the content of all these stories on the hardware installed in the park
- Play the content of the adventures in the parks. This allows interactive stations plugged into the whole story with any type of interactivity (live actors, physical puzzles, shooting on a screen, motion tracking…)
- Keep logs of the actions of visitors, their special status, next adventures to discover, changes in the world, history of actions or elements of the world.
- Understand the behaviour of the visitors and improve the stories as well as create additional content.
Immersive experiences and activations have been a trend in our industry for the last 10 years. We believe the depth and complexity of the immersive experiences will keep evolving, allowing guests to change the whole environment, return and continue their adventures, interact with the attractions as well as with live actors, props, and every other element a themed venue can provide for a full immersion.
This raises the question of how to efficiently design these complex, intricate and ever evolving stories? And how to make sure that the venue is going to activate them as designed, follow each visitor’s stories, while keeping a cohesive ever evolving world?
The innovation of the Wander lies in the approach to the problem and the industrialisation of stories which until now had to be handcrafted.
Multiple activation and full scale LARP’s styled interaction have already been created for themed venues or brand representation. But all of those had been manually written, then played by actors who had to learn texts or clues to be able to follow the personal story of each visitor. This limits the scope of the adventures, of the world in which the visitors can interact, the impact possible on this world, the possibility to come back another day and continue his story, and so on…
Our approach has been to design a softwares’ suite as a support tool to create and activate the stories in the mind of designers and to avoid natural limitations. We have studied and adapted the tools and concepts used in the video game industry, as this industry has created massive multiplayer open world games for years.
We have then adapted that to the themed entertainment industry in order to provide tools which would respect the usual production process of an attraction, taking into account the physical limitations created by a themed venue, standardizing the software layers and communications to add any type of interactivity and adapting the content to match the usual visitors journey in a park and finally make sure the product would be profitable for the themed venue
The Wander uses a suite of software packages which are dedicated to each step of the product life cycle and profession in our industry.
