Sugar Creative delivers wonder through innovation. Bringing imagination to life, with inspirational and incredible outcomes for everything from entertainment to marketing and science. The studio was formed in 2008 and has grown from strength to strength via our boundary pushing projects and the bespoke work produced for IPs and organisations such as Aardman, BBC, OSMO, InnovateUK, WelshGov, and now FestivalUK*2022. We realise new forms of narratives and experiences, continuously delivering on the frontline of tech innovation within the AR/VR industry.
We pride ourselves on the originality and ground-breaking nature of the work that the studio produces. Our recent partnership with Dr Seuss Enterprises led to the creation of ‘Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing AR Alphabet!’ app.
‘Dr. Seuss’s ABC – An Amazing AR Alphabet!’ brought to life, for the first time in the history of the brand, one of the most popular children’s books in a ground-breaking learning app experience with an interactive story and characters. A next generation experience that builds on one of the most beloved children's international brands, not undermining the integrity or the joy of the original but as a symbiotic extension, working in partnership with its original form to enhance it.
As a learning tool the ‘Dr. Seuss’s ABC – An Amazing AR Alphabet!’ app explored the potential of learning tools that combined the physical with the virtual, not to create a carbon copy of the original text but enriching it with new points of engagement, enhancing the experience of the original so that they work together. The rhymes and characters so familiar with families were still there but for the first time children could see characters come to life, and with added responsive letter tracing children were able to develop a key early years skill.
This experience also utilised our pre-release access to pioneering Unity tool MARS, and made the app the first of its kind in the commercial market to feature real world awareness. This tool enabled us to push our creativity to the max and fully explore and push the boundaries of what was possible within AR. It did this by creating a hybrid world where the lines between imagination and reality blur, and due to the intelligent awareness of the digital content. Children are then able to play games in their own rooms, from painting the room and playing hide and seek behind your real world furniture, a unique and magical experience like no other.
This project is one example of how all of the work that we produce aims to solve a problem, be it UKRI asking us how we reimagine how we use today’s technology to tell stories to large audiences with ‘Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up’ and ‘Fix Up The City’, or our work as part of the ‘Collective Cymru’ team of FestivalUK*2022 as we explore how immersive content can realise new inspiring cultural experiences.
We are disrupting the industry with our ideas and speed that we can produce large scale projects that far exceed the size of our ambitious, diverse and multi talented team. We love exploring the possibility of emerging technologies, never faltering on our highly ambitious expectations of the final product.
We have now become regarded as a leading global voice for the application of next generation AR; in enriching children's brands within new markets, creating educational digital interactivity in physical driven IPs, and as a key demonstrator of the potential for next gen intelligent AR.
Our learnings have been shared on the world stage to help drive an industry awareness of the potential of emerging technology for new narratives and types of engagement. This can be shown via multiple talks at global conferences by Sugar Creative Director Will Humphrey including ‘Unity: Digital developer day’, ‘VARA global summit 2021’, Unity: Behind the app, IAB brand disruption summit, and the ‘2021 Media and Entertainment Industry Trends Report’ from Unity.
Alongside positive audience reviews and continuous positive feedback from clients we also see this reflected in frequent placements in Google and Apple’s App of the Week on multiple releases, and for both ‘Dr. Seuss’s ABC – An Amazing AR Alphabet!’ and The Big Fix Up they have been listed in Apple’s Top 5 Apps for Families.
In 2021 we have set our aims high and are looking forward to pushing this innovation even further with the upcoming release of products that range from stepping through time with living history to entertainment focused city scale immersive experiences that will awe and inspire the world.
