Gorillaz, the world’s greatest virtual band created by musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, have returned after a seven year hiatus with a highly anticipated new album, ‘Humanz’.

With every album, Gorillaz have pushed the frontier of innovation and storytelling. Huge leaps in mobile technology during their hiatus presented us with a radical opportunity to break new ground and tell the Gorillaz story in a completely new way.

Our task was to launch the album and create an immersive storytelling platform for the future.

Following in the steps of Kong Studios and Point Nemo, the Spirit House is the band’s new residence at heart of the ‘Humanz’ narrative. Gorillaz app is a motion-tracked 360 looking glass into the Spirit House, and an AR layer that brings it into our world. The app opens on the augmented live view of the device’s camera - breaking the reality barrier in very first interaction. 3D menu-objects, augmented into user’s surroundings, each open a portal into a room within the virtual house.

Creating each environment and AR object from the ground up in Jamie Hewlett’s iconic style required a seamless combination of CG, in-device rendering and photo-realistic compositing. A first-of-it’s-kind geo-specific AR listening experience then brought Gorillaz into fans’ world at 500+ locations around the globe.

We pushed the nascent WebVR and WebGL technologies, deployed as an app, to deliver a smooth, optimised performance across multiple platforms and devices.