Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) China’s revolutionary game for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) won a Silver Pencil at the recent One Show Entertainment Awards.
Part of the team that pushed for and developed the game is senior writer Carol Ong. Hailing from Bacolod, Ong is a familiar face in the industry, having worked in Basic Advertising, Ace Saatchi & Saatchi and BBDO Guerrero Ortega before she was plucked by BBH China. She is also a contributor for adobo magazine and was the creator of its Cloned column. Others know her as the Bag Lady, for her extensive collection of unique bags.
The WWF campaign uses a groundbreaking technology jointly developed by BBH China and social digital nature system (SDNS) company Qdero. Shijie Lens Technology is the first and only mobile application where the real and virtual worlds meet in real time. In a landmark step, BBH China created not only the idea but also partly the software.
According to Ong, "They said it couldn’t be done, there was no technology for it. [They said] it hasn’t been done for computers, it’s impossible on mobile. So we decided to develop the software ourselves, partnered up with Qdero, and figured out the simplest way to read our complex environment. This is how the WWF mobile app, and the Shijie Lens Technology it runs on, came to be."
Central to the game is a virtual bear, struggling to adapt to an unfamiliar habitat: the surroundings of each user’s office, home, or city, seen through the eyes of their camera phone.
Once the application is downloaded from the WWF China homepage and the game selected, point the camera phone anywhere and you will see the virtual bear – and watch it bump into the same walls, trip down the same stairs and run from the same moving cars that you see around you. The technology tracks the real environment the bear is in and translates this into a 3D computer model that allows the bear to calculate its position on the phone screen.
Ending with the message ‘Wildlife’s fate is in your hands’, the campaign also has a social component – through their phone, users can sign up directly to the WWF China webpage. Click "share", and the app opens a pre-written SMS that can be easily sent to everyone in the user’s address book. Users can also act by spreading the word via email, blogs, and social media.
“The game translates bio-diversity conservation into a simple visual language that is particularly appealing to the youth, whose support is increasingly vital to our conservation efforts” says Jing Hui, WWF China’s Director of Communications.
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