Case study: Riot Games chooses Pixotope to augment LPL Pro League Finals event

How The Future Groups mixed reality platform helped bring League of Legends star Akali to life

By Contributor

Published: June 18, 2020

How The Future Group's mixed reality platform helped bring League of Legends' star Akali to life

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When Riot Games wanted to add an eye-catching augmented reality extravaganza to the Pro League Finals event based on their League Of Legends game characters, the company decided to partner with The Future Group and their innovative Pixotope mixed reality platform.

League of Legends can be described without exaggeration as an internet phenomenon. With over 100 million monthly players, the game's creators, Riot Games, generate annual revenues in excess of $1.5 billion. The team-based strategy game enables players to choose a champion to play as. With a unique back story and specific skills, each champion helps drive player affiliation in the same way that real-world sports players attract a fan base.

The venue for the live esports event was Shanghai's 18,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Arena and the pinnacle of the augmented reality content featured Akali, one of League of Legends' most popular champions, singing and dancing with real dancers on stage, before being interviewed live in front of the packed arena. The Future Group's Pixotope systems were to be found at the heart of the AR action.

Augmenting Akali Kevin Scharff from Riot Games explains why they wanted Akali to visit the real world via augmented reality at the live finals event: We felt there was an opportunity to utilise AR to bring a live, real-time performance of one of our champions, which became the live interview of Akali with Candice, one of the event hosts. We found that the most compelling cases for AR character use had taken place in live, unscripted expressions. There is something magical and authentic when a virtual character interacts in the moment' that goes beyond a fully scripted and pre-recorded expression. AR allowed us to marry the virtual character to the real world.

It is the extraction of game characters into the real world that is so important to the diversified IP expressions and fans experience for Riot Games. Thomas Tang from the Riot Games IP & Creative team explains, Riot has a great reputation of being a trendsetter for game and esports music. Over the course of 10 plus years, the company has built many music legacies including the hit champ MV Get Jinxed and phenomenal worlds anthem Legends Never Die. Creating a super edgy virtual idol band called K/DA and launching its first live performance on our Worlds Final Championship was another big bet the company made in 2018.

Sophie Xiao from Riot adds, Virtual idols are very popular in China, and the technology and people's understanding of virtual idols are maturing super-fast day by day. We believe Riot is uniquely positioned to take another leap of faith and do some more experimental AR music endeavour in 2020. The goal is simple, keep building up our virtual idols and make them feel truly real' and authentic, as if they are real human beings. Real time motion capture and live AR is not only visually stunning but also highly interactive and emotionally engaging. This is the less travelled path we want to take this time.

She continues, Therefore, bringing Akali, the most popular champion from the virtual band K/DA back to the LPL Summer Final stage, seemed to be a great opportunity to further deepen our IP and technology, celebrate our hard-core fans, and hopefully reach more pan-entertainment audience in China.

Promo concept poster before the show to tease Akali coming to Shanghai In reality, Akali is a CG character from a game and so, even though augmenting a CG character to shots from the live event doesn't sound that difficult, there is a great deal involved. The level of interaction with show lighting, free moving cameras, recorded and live motion capture, as well as facial expression capture with voice lip-sync, led to a uniquely complicated scenario to achieve the end results.

Kevin Scharff continues, To complement the Riot team's efforts in developing the character assets for the event, we called in The Future Group, who were such fantastic partners at Worlds 2018 in Korea, to help bring the AR experience together.

The Future Group is the developer of mixed reality platform Pixotope. However, they are more than just a software engineering company. They retain expertise across all the various disciplines that are called into play when creating an augmented reality event. This enables them to work closely with their customer's creative departments to bring technically complicated ideas to life, while also having the capacity to suggest alternative routes and how to achieve the maximum impact from ever-advancing technology.

For the Riot Games event, The Future Group deployed a team of five augmented reality experts, including chief creative officer, ystein Larsen and senior product specialist, David Stroud, to assess and solve the various challenges.

The Future Group specified and installed four Pixotope augmented reality platforms. Each system generated real-time augmented material and combined it with a live action background. There were three Pixotope systems connected to three different camera feeds, plus one more in reserve as a live backup. Each Pixotope contained a digital model of the Akali character and stage assets, as well as a virtual tracked camera which matched its real-world counterpart.

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