Horton, Shelley Adamson

Battle of the Baddest: AR Microsite

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‘It’s great to be able to bring high-end character scanning and performance capture to web-based mobile AR. The performances from the fighters translated perfectly to the medium and the final assets look incredibly realistic, even at larger-than-life-scale with a comparatively low file size.’

Horton, Executive Creative Director, UNIT9

‘We set out to create a legendary AR experience that would unleash the Fury vs. Ngannou showdown like never before. It soon grew to be a bold hub for all things ‘Battle of the Baddest’ – spiced up with a $150k prize pot, making sure the stakes were as high for our audience as the fighters in the ring.’

Shelley Adamson, Creative Director, UNIT9

The brief

The two baddest men on the planet, Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou, launched Riyadh Season 2023 by squaring off against each other in the ultimate boxing match – the Battle of the Baddest. To help drive global awareness, physical attendance and online streaming of the bout, we were tasked with creating a number of tent-pole activations to celebrate the epic showdown – including a microsite to help fans get closer to the hotly-anticipated fight and its fighters.

The execution

As one of the most high profile sporting events of the year, we knew we had to drive excitement with an interactive experience that fans could engage with on multiple levels. Designed for desktop and mobile, the Battle of the Baddest microsite brought various media, event coverage and competitions together in one place for fans to explore before the fight – including a mobile WebAR experience featuring AR replicas of the fighters.

The AR experience allows users to place digital replicas of Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou in their environment at three different scales – city scale, true-to-life and tabletop – as well as viewing key stats for each fighter. Creating the AR characters from 3D scans of the fighters themselves, we were able to make sure each one represented not just their physical form, but their distinct personalities, characteristics and movements too.

With limited time to capture the fighters in-studio, we needed to ensure that our assets worked incredibly hard. From a single shoot, we captured photogrammetry and mo-cap data to recreate Fury and Ngannou accurately from all aspects – from their outward appearance to movements and interactions – and by using a real punching bag as a prop during the motion capture phase we were able to bring a true sense of life and physicality to the characters in AR. Capturing film-level VFX assets like this in a short amount of time was definitely a challenge, but it allowed us to integrate incredibly realistic AR avatars that made the whole experience come alive for fans.

Using the latest 8th Wall features including Sky Segmentation, we were able to detect where the sky separates from the land in order to place the AR assets more accurately in the user’s environment with improved occlusion. Spatialized Audio allowed us to adapt the sounds within the experience depending on where the user placed their AR characters, with real time reverberation underlining just how epic the upcoming showdown will be.

The Battle Of The Baddest microsite also hosted two different competitions for fans to enter – a chance to win $50,000 for the most impressive photo captured from the AR experience, shared using #battleofthebaddestAR on Instagram and X; and a second competition encouraging fans to predict the fight outcome for a chance to win $100,000.

The results

The Battle of the Baddest microsite had everything a boxing fan could want under one URL. Reaching fans in 167 different countries and with an average engagement time of 1m 40sec per user, we successfully drummed up global excitement for the historic fight and allowed visitors to interact with their sporting heroes before the epic showdown.