Cinematographic · Interactive · Experiential · Augmented Reality
A Miralupa division · Montreal & Québec City
CieAR put life-size, motion-captured 3D actors into real places and let visitors walk among them with a tablet or phone in hand. Part game, part cinema: you weren’t watching the story, you were standing in it.
In 2016, most mobile augmented reality meant a 3D logo floating over a printed page. CieAR set out to do something much harder: stage full scenes, with actors at human scale, perfectly aligned with the walls, doors and furniture of a real building, complete with spatial sound, on the phones and tablets people already owned.
It is the turn of the 20th century, and you are in the middle of a criminal investigation. Your spectroscope (the tablet in your hands) reveals the ghosts around you and helps you solve the mystery surrounding the death of La Stilla, one of the most famous sopranos of the Belle Époque.
A story of ghosts and technology, driven by suspense and hard-boiled intrigue, that takes players through many locations over the course of a few hours. Each chapter can take place somewhere different: a theatre, a museum, a bank, a shopping mall, an office.
Real footage, recorded on an iPad
In 2019, Necropolis opened to the public as Phantasmagorie in Shawinigan, Québec. Visitors carried an iPad through a real church and a real theatre, and the ghosts appeared exactly where the story needed them: by the altar, in the pulpit, behind the bars of a cell.
The game starting up, La Stilla at the altar, Jeanne behind the asylum bars and the priest in his floating pulpit. Short excerpts from recordings made on site, joined together, with no added effects.
Each character was played by a real actor, captured and rebuilt in 3D. The cast also lived on a deck of augmented reality cards: point a phone at a card and its character steps out.
Visitors used a phone, a tablet or video glasses. Arriving at certain spots, they saw life-size 3D characters appear around them in a fully animated scene, placed in real space and lined up with the real objects in the room.
Characters could stand behind a real doorway, sit in a real chair or point at a real painting on the wall, and they stayed there as you walked around them.
Real actors, captured in motion and recreated in 3D at human scale.
Miralupa’s MARGE™ platform aligned every virtual element precisely with the real venue, in real time.
Geolocation triggered each chapter as players moved from one venue to the next.
Spatialized audio placed voices where the characters stood, and the platform supported multilingual experiences.
Museums, cities, event organizers, theme parks and film studios could personalize and build on the CieAR platform to create new revenue streams and give new life to the places and stories they already had.
CieAR brought together people from games, film and design, and combined motion-captured real actors with real-time graphics. Every step of the pipeline was done in-house or with Québec partners.
01Script, characters and sets designed by hand before anything was built in 3D.
02Actors performed every scene on a full-body motion-capture stage.
03Facial capture and studio voice recording kept every expression and line of dialogue.
04Photogrammetry rigs scanned actors in costume so their 3D doubles looked like them.
From the motion-capture stage to the tablet. 1 min.
Voice, face and body capture in 40 seconds.
Sculpting the characters and props, from sketch to 3D. 1 min 40.
The experience, filmed on real tablets in real rooms. 40 sec.
Links open archived copies on the Internet Archive, since some of the original pages are no longer online.
Life-size performances, locked to real rooms, running on the devices in people’s pockets. CieAR showed that years before it became commonplace.
The division is gone, but the know-how isn’t. The precise alignment, tracking and live-character pipeline CieAR pushed forward lives on in MARGE™ and in Miralupa’s work today, from museums and events to retail and the operating room.
Have a museum, festival, venue or story that deserves to come to life? Send us a message and get the conversation started.
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