Meta’s New AR Filter Magically Brings Mural to Life

Creative innovation company, The Electric Factory, has teamed up with Meta Open Arts to launch an innovative AR filter. The augmented reality filter accompanies a newly designed colourful mural in Meta’s São Paulo offices in Brazil.

The project saw The Electric Factory team up with Brazilian artist Talita Hoffmann to add a layer of immersive storytelling in order to transport viewers into the art. The team developed custom 3D and procedural animations to pack a fully immersive experience under 4MB. With different layers of interactivity, including beautiful directional sound design, the team brought the mural to life and lifted it off the wall.

Located in the central hub of the office space, the mural encapsulates the unique energy and essence of the city. Heavily influenced by the surrounding colourful landscape, the mural brings a ‘touch of colour’ and a local wink to the bustling São Paulo offices. The use of contrasting patterns and textures pays respect to the natural world, whilst the colourful and slightly distorted style of the AR filter brings a dreamy feel to the artwork, successfully referencing the concept of the metaverse as a place where real spaces can be represented in an enhanced way.

In order to further capture the surreal and dreamlike quality of the mural, sound designers, technical artists and developers at The Electric Factory worked closely with Talita to create the Spark AR filter, which enables users to experience the intricate skyline transitioning from day to night, as city lights turn on and off, while trees shed their leaves and grow them back as seasons pass.

Once activated by the filter, motifs of colourful plants and trees fill the walls and suddenly appear to grow right in front of the user’s eyes. Elements of the artwork lift off the wall and magically seep into the office space, creating an additive layer of discovery for Meta’s employees. Expanding on the mural’s strong references to the metaverse, the AR filter transforms the artwork into a portal to the future, where users can see time pass harmoniously in an augmented way.

The idea behind the activation is to transport visitors and Meta’s employees from the distant past to the near future, illuminating stories of untold histories and futuristic dreams. The experience displays the artistic synergies between physical and digital artworks, creating an additive layer of discovery.

The campaign will run on Meta Open Arts' Instagram account @metaopenarts. 

Santiago Anglés, creative technology officer at The Electric Factory says: “It was thrilling to work collaboratively with Talita and find the balance between what she did on the mural and how we can add to the experience. It was great to combine our expertise in AR with the art and the final piece is a mixture of our knowledge and creative collaboration between the two teams. It turned out wonderfully.

Spark SDK helped us prototype and find a playful way to interact with the project. We created a rough draft as a working experience and then we played around with it, working on the details and polishing the effect. After creating the first version, we started iterating and adding more layers of content on top of that. We combined 2D and 3D animation, which brought a playfulness to the experience. AR art allows us to give life to a picture or an image, so we can create bigger space, add storytelling to the artist's vision and create a new story around that.”

Sofía Martínez, art director adds: “The real challenge of this project was to understand the artistic vision created by the artist in order to really enhance the experience. Working hand in hand with the artist was definitely the best way to ensure that the integration of AR into the piece felt organic and coherent. It was a flowing conversation in which both parts understood the role the other had and respected that she guided us through her art and we guided her through the visual and technical possibilities to come out on the other side with a final result. We think that this is an interesting step to take to explore what technology has to offer in this field and really challenge the way we interact with the artistic world.”