By Ellen Lo July 29, 2024
https://vimeo.com/867294658?share=copy
Created with the New York Times, Wireloop is a mobile AR game series that are inspired by the classic wire loop game. By tracing the path in space, the player moves the ring along the curve and unveils the image hidden by anamorphosis.
The AR effects were developed with Meta Spark Studio and released on Instagram. They garnered more than 1.8M views and 30K captures in total. In fact, the series on average successfully attained more than 15% in capture-to-view ratio, one of the highest among the effects created by the New York Times.
The Wireloop project emerged as the winning idea from an internal game idea pitch, with my contribution receiving the highest number of votes.
As the Lead AR Developer of the Wireloop project, I was in charge of developing prototypes and writing production-ready code that cover all aspects of the game, including gameplay mechanics and visual effects. I collaborated closely with a multidisciplinary team of designers and artists, ensuring that the game is not only intuitive and fun to play, but also adheres to the principle and aesthetics of NYT Games, maintaining the familiar experience that readers and players have come to expect.
To keep track of players’ progress on the path, I wrote custom logic by evaluating the dot product of device position and the nearest wire position, in order to overcome the lack of reliable physics library of Spark Studio. As the players’ performance can be measured by the distance from the ring to the wire, I used it as a variable to control the brightness of the color on the materials of the ring and the wire, via a fragment shader, hinting at their performance without intrusively indicating any score or value. If the ring has completely fallen off the wire, the nearest wire segment will look like it’s tapering and crumbling, a visual trick enabled by displacing mesh vertices and triggering particle systems.
