Our Year at Sugar

What a year this has been for Sugar. We are ending the year on a huge high whilst looking forward to 2023 with excitement. 

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This year we have worked closely with brilliant cultural organisations such as National Museum Wales, Clwstwr and the Wales Millennium Centre, whose future-facing visions enabled us to create pieces full of wonder and innovation. These include the upcoming Arall project which uses AR to explore the multilayers narratives inside museum collections, and The Making Of a Monster, combining the amazing spoken word performances of Connor Allen with AR pieces to bring elements of the world into the immersive world. 

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At Sugar we passionately believe in radical inclusive design. It is vital for our industry to embrace this as a starting point for all projects so that it is integrated within all design and not as an afterthought. We have spent the second half of 2022 working closely with deaf communities to learn more about BSL and how this can be motion captured to enable its inclusion in the VR world - a first that we are so inspired by.   

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We ended the year with the launch of the 878 AD immersive experience in the city of Winchester. Created in partnership with iconic game developers Ubisoft and Hampshire Cultural Trust, 878 AD is a trailblazing project for the conversion of high quality game assets into mobile ready AR. Using geolocated technology to unlock AR experiences as users explore the historic streets gave the studio its biggest challenge yet. By combining these immersive innovations with history we were able to offer a unique interpretation into the past and change how curation can embrace technology. 

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All the way back in the spring we ventured over the Atlantic to be part of the UK delegation at SXSW, speaking about our experience of creating Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up alongside our fellow consortium collaborators Tiny Rebel Games and Potato. We then hopped over to San Francisco for GDC with our friends at Creative Wales. Getting to connect with our industry in person again after so many years was a definite highlight, roll on 2023…

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Our plans to expand and develop more groundbreaking experiences will continue as we look forward to continuing our partnerships with innovation giants like Unity and Niantic, bringing imagination to life. Keep an eye on our social channels over the next few months for more announcements on our latest work. 

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