Staff Writer
Jun 13, 2018

Shadow Factory makes push for VR, AR in marketing

From virtual tours to Facebook's mobile camera effects, the company is pushing the envelope in creativity and technology.

Shadow Factory makes push for VR, AR in marketing

In a span of two years, Shadow Factory has made great strides toward becoming the leading VR digital studio in Asia. Producing high-end virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences, the company has executed a diverse set of projects from virtual tours, to 360-degree videos, to Facebook AR filters, as well as their own proprietary software. Pushing the creative and technical boundaries of the industry, the studio’s goal is to close the gap between VR and the commercial mainstream.

We have an amazing team and we have a very flat organizational structure. This has enabled our creative, tech, and operations to seamlessly work together without having to worry about getting siloed or generating a lot of bureaucratic overhead. It's one of the reasons we're racing ahead of our competitors, globally. - Amit Chatterjee, partner & co-founder, Shadow Factory

Established in 2016 by founders Amit Chatterjee and Devin Ehrig, the company has grown rapidly from startup to nearly 50 people across their Hong Kong and Toronto offices, servicing multinational clients spanning the Asia Pacific region and North America. This crack team of production artists and digital designers, specialists in a broad range of disciplines, would go on to put theory to the test, constructing 360-degree computer-generated environments wherein users can move freely and interact with the surroundings—the canvas upon which anything can take shape, enabling them to build and customise all sorts of immersive experiences.

We've become experts at solving these problems for enterprise companies. We've been knocking on doors every day since we opened. What we've found is that a lot of people are excited about VR but they're struggling with envisioning their brand or product in a VR campaign. Moreover, they're unsure how to pull the budget together. That's where we come in..." - Devin Ehrig, partner & co-founder, Shadow Factory

Shadow Factory has clients spanning hospitality and tourism, commercial engineering, retail including fashion and beauty products, fine art, entertainment and events, cross-border trade and e-commerce, and blockchain technologies.

The company is also producing the creative for Blockchain Studio’s joint venture CryptoCarz, which was voted the number two blockchain startup to watch at Consensus this year in New York. 

The company has also developed enterprise tools for VR showrooms, including a VR content management system with geolocation functionality.

Event
Surf
Shadow Factory's own snow-surfing VR game

As VR gaming remains most commonly and consistently associated with the platform, Shadow Factory has created numerous branded titles including wind and snow-surfing simulators and a reflex-based “ride and catch” game commissioned for a Michael Kors promotional campaign by DFS. This game won the agency a Centauri at the 2017 Vega Digital Awards and was cited as one among the Top 4 VR Experiences at the 2018 MIPTV Conference in Cannes. Several other titles are in the works as the company is scheduled to release its formal entry into the VR gaming space this year.

The Michael Kors/DFS "ride and catch" VR game

In the field of augmented reality, Shadow Factory is the go-to vendor for producing camera effects on Facebook’s AR platform, their effects having been used by over 1 million users this year. Shadow Factory maintains a close working relationship with Facebook and continues to participate at F8 and other global Facebook developer meetups.

Shadow Factory makes full use of Facebook's AR platform

An outstanding team equipped with extensive skill sets and the latest digital toolkits, Shadow Factory continues to explore new and exciting ways to engage audiences, using technology and imagination to create meaningful, story-driven, fully-immersive, and interactive experiences.

 

Source:
Campaign Asia

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