Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the most popular games in the world, with an audience of 150 million players, has launched an expansion called Dragonflight. As a way of promoting the game, the producer Blizzard Entertainment created augmented reality experiences to generate buzz in the media and on social media. The SENNO group, through ARKx, our extended reality arm, was responsible for the technical and creative leadership of the project, in partnership with the agencies Buoy and Form and Fun.

The Get Your Own Dragon campaign ran in November and December 2022 and invited Hollywood stars such as Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian), David Harbour (Stranger Things) and Lana Condor (X-Men: Apocalypse) and aimed to transport the dragons from World of Warcraft to the real world.

Before starting development, we performed a benchmark on the main functionalities and limitations of existing augmented reality platforms.

The study concluded that, at the time, the 8th Wall and Snapchat platforms provided the tools and resources needed to develop the experience, helping to overcome the challenge of optimizing file sizes to be faithful to the original WoW craft.

With this study in mind, we developed WebAR experiences where users accessed the campaign website and used their smartphone camera to play, touch, interact, move the dragon, increase and decrease its size, take selfies with the digital dragon and even make it roar.

We also created Snapchat filters for the character Dracthyr, a hybrid race between a human and a dragon, exploring the new and growing Social AR industry. The platform combined technical capabilities with a high level of engagement, especially in the American market, one of the campaign's focuses.

The SENNO group led the entire process, from selecting cutting-edge technology to delivering an immersive, interactive and extremely fun experience.

ARKx, in turn, was responsible for developing the augmented reality content, which included 3D modeling and animation of the dragons to seamlessly integrate them into the platforms.

The augmented reality activations were a hit with the WoW fan community, who shared photos and videos with friends and cherished the unforgettable moment of playing with their favorite World of Warcraft dragons in the real world.