With House of the Dragon: DracARys, we sought to build the most personalized, responsive, virtual creature to ever live on your phone, brought to life with the latest in augmented reality technology. DracARys was born out of an initiative to blend emerging technologies with the world of House of the Dragon, creating a unique and immersive experience for fans and newcomers alike.

With DracARys, we wanted to bring the dragons of Westeros into our world using the magic of AR. To truly immerse fans in the dragon-raising experience, the journey begins by stealing an egg from Westeros. Fans then hatch, raise and train their own dragon, bonding with it as they explore the world together. We wanted to create a seamless and intuitive experience that makes fans feel like they are part of the House of the Dragon universe. Designing it around the concept of AR ensured there were less leaps of understanding required by the user to immerse themselves. For the dragons to feel convincingly integrated into the world we leaned into the new developments in AR technology, which were the driving force behind the project.

This app was meant for super fans and casual fans. We targeted Game of Thrones die-hards, fantasy geeks, culture vultures and tech enthusiasts. In terms of the user experience, it was kept relatively loose to incite discovery among users. By doing this, super fans were able to engage with more content and discover Easter eggs and casual users could still grow and progress their dragons in their own time.

To build a sense of community and connect our users, we leveraged social and prompted users to post/share updates on their dragons. Everything on the app is sharable, from photos and videos to the milestone log. There is also a feature where you can see all of the dragons who have matured and been released into the world.

The experience was designed to blend the boundaries between creative, UX and technology:

Procedural dragons, ensuring no two dragons are alike.

Cutting edge AR that is depth aware, allowing dragons to react/affect their environment.

App engagements with fun/dynamic interactions (commands using bespoke Valyrian voice recognition).

Inciting a sense of discovery and exploration immersing users in the show’s lore (intelligent food system, camera to detect 5 different environments and find new food sources based on your location).

We pushed technological boundaries by making every part of this experience reactive. We created a new AR navigation system to ensure the dragons were reacting in a realistic manner. This system generated dynamic navigable surfaces at runtime which gave us more control and meant we could use powerful features like NavMeshAgent (pathfinding), NavMeshLinks (jumps) and have better integration with other Unity systems.

This app was launched in 99 countries for iOS & Android.

The experience was designed to blend the boundaries between creative, UX and technology:

Procedural dragons, ensuring no two dragons are alike.

Cutting edge AR that is depth aware, allowing dragons to react/affect their environment.

App engagements with fun/dynamic interactions (commands using bespoke Valyrian voice recognition).

Inciting a sense of discovery and exploration immersing users in the show’s lore (intelligent food system, camera to detect 5 different environments and find new food sources based on your location).

We pushed technological boundaries by making every part of this experience reactive. We created a new AR navigation system to ensure the dragons were reacting in a realistic manner. This system generated dynamic navigable surfaces at runtime which gave us more control and meant we could use powerful features like NavMeshAgent (pathfinding), NavMeshLinks (jumps) and have better integration with other Unity systems.

This app was launched in 99 countries for iOS & Android.

We were thrilled to see almost half a million users express their creativity and personality through their dragons, each one unique. When the dragons reached adulthood and flew away to join other dragons from around the world, it was an emotional moment seeing the sky filled with these majestic creatures – and a testament to the power of AR. The app also sparked a community of passionate fans who created their own forum to share stories and updates about their dragons. The forum is still active today, showing how much fans love their dragons.