Ventuz Counts Down to the New Year

The Lunar New Year is the most important holiday in Vietnam. Trains are packed and flights are overbooked as everyone tries to spend the holiday with family. Another thing almost everyone does is watch the New Year’s Show on the national TV channel HTV3. And this year, viewers were treated to some Ventuz-powered augmented reality.

Agency Interactive Asia was commissioned to enhance the broadcast with an augmented graphics package with only a breathtaking 3 days of preparation time. But as old-school Ventuzians, Matthias and his team didn’t break a sweat. Instead, they used the amazing view from the show stage across the Ho Cho Minh City skyline to create a custom mask which they then filled with high-end graphical content.

The motto of the 2018 New Year’s Show was “Lights 2018”. Following this motto, the team created a variety of light effects such as flowing lines, exploding particles, rising balloons and much more. The center piece was a large clock projected into the skyline which showed the current time – since New Year is all about the stroke of midnight. To keep the virtual clock in sync with real clocks on site, the team wrote a small piece of logic that interfaced with the stage mechanics.

With a whole evening worth of show and lots of on-site activity, the team of Interactive Asia kept the pace by designing a show control interface in Ventuz which they used behind the scenes to trigger animations and transitions in the augmented reality project. All in all, the show was a great success – and 2018 promises to be an amazing year for Interactive Asia.