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Sorry, space cats, this interactive A-Ha video is the best use of ARKit we’ve seen

Sorry, space cats, this interactive A-Ha video is the best use of ARKit we’ve seen

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Taaaaake on meeeeee

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“Take On Me” augmented reality
Courtesy of TRIXI studios

I’m sure there are plenty of serious, business-y applications for iOS 11’s ARKit framework, but bless humans, because it’s also being used for very important and practical things like space cats and little BB-8 sidekicks.

Now, Chicago-based TRIXI studios has seemingly done the impossible and created an application for ARKit that is more monumental than space cats (and cats are one of the pillars of the internet) — an augmented reality version of A-Ha’s iconic sketch video for “Take on Me.”

“We had portals in [first-person shooter] PHANTOGEIST on Project Tango last year,” TRIXI founder Chip Sineni tells The Verge, “and instantly thought of the ‘Take on Me’ video... When ARKit came along, we were very excited by the idea that just ‘normal’ phones could do such great AR, so it seemed like the perfect situation to stress test what ARKit could do.”

A-Ha’s original video, a short-form piece where a comic book character comes to life and falls in love with a girl, took months to make with its thousands of hand-drawn sketches that were then applied to a live-action shoot with rotoscoping. TRIXI’s take only took a couple of days. “The hardest part was not having the all the live video receive the post effect,” says Sineni. “But [we] really wanted that effect of turning your world into the ‘Take on Me’ experience, not a baked in experience.”

The TRIXI team says the video was all possible with purchases from Unity 3D’s Asset Stores. GameFlow was utilized for visual scripting, the characters and animations were done using Mixamo, and then AI assets were used to give them logic. “It is crazy how asset stores have democratized code and art for game making,” says Sineni, “that anyone can do this so quickly now.”

Take that, space cats.