Using live augmented reality, we brought a life-sized Elder Dragon into an Olympic stadium.

With 2017's finals taking place in the iconic Beijing National Stadium, also known as the "Bird's Nest," there was an opportunity to leverage the character of the massive, 80,000 capacity arena to bridge the worlds of traditional sports and League of Legends.

During a six month period a team of artists worked to create an animation that could:

Incorporate real-time 3D masking that enabled the Dragon to appear behind the stadium as it entered and left

Cast accurate soft shadows on geometry the size of a stadium

Utilize real-time color correction to match exposure and contrast of the cameras and environment

Synchronize with multiple tracking cameras

Operate on multiple rendering engines to allow for different camera angles and shots of the Dragon

Synchronize with the musical performance from the opening ceremony

The broadcast featuring the AR Elder Dragon was carried on a dozen streaming platforms, to five continents and required no additional hardware to experience.

The Elder Dragon was a hit with League of Legends fans, driving nearly 400,000 conversations on Facebook that day, trending alongside #Worlds2017 in two dozen countries on Twitter, & racking up millions of views though multiple videos on Youtube .

The spectacle contributed to driving a record-setting viewership of 57 million fans who tuned in to watch the League of Legends World Championship Finals across streaming platforms that included Youtube, Twitch, Afreeca, DouYu, and HuYa.

This project reimagined an entertainment IP that touches millions of people daily, took it out of a two dimensional screen and brought it to life at the biggest esports activation the client brand organizes every year.

The target audience were the fans of the game who number over 100 million. While all of them play the game, it was imperative to raise awareness that the event was taking place NOW. Spread around every corner of the globe, the message needed to supersede the language barriers that divide this massive audience. By leveraging a visual element of the game players were universally familiar with, the message was able to reverberate globally.

The World Championship and it’s opening ceremony are an enthralling spectacle when experienced in-person alongside tens of thousands of rabid, cheering fans. But with a vast majority of the audience watching from home, what could be done to make their experience just as powerful?

The idea to bring an Elder Dragon to a League of Legends event had been floated internally by the client for many years, and in 2017 they decided to pursue the project.