The Washington Post Winter Olympic AR app

The Washington Post Winter Olympics AR app

In the midst of the Winter Olympic Games PyeongChang, The Washington Post added a sporty 3D augmented reality experience to their classic app. Powered by Wikitude technology, viewers can now see athletes racing on an augmented 3D track projected in their own physical environment.

By The Washington Post

“We are really excited about AR technology, and we thought the Olympics would be a good opportunity to try something fun and a little different.”
Kat Downs | Director of Product | The Washington Post

To boost up the Winter Olympics mood and engage their readers even further, The Washington Post created an Olympics AR game, to include in their Olympic coverage plan, that simulates winter sports categories in action with realistic speed reference and performance style.

By interacting with the immersive AR story, viewers get to see 3D winter athletes performing right in front of their eyes (three pre-selected matches), and they also have a chance to learn more about many interesting Olympic facts. By answering a fun trivia, users try to guess and subsequently get to learn more about speed and comparisons of nine Winter Olympic events, records, and detailed explanations about some different sports held during the winter games.

Readers that already have The Washington Post Classic app, can simply navigate to the game by opening the app and swiping right on the menu bar until reaching the AR section to select the experience.

Constantly exploring new ways to connect with their readers, the publisher chose Wikitude’s augmented reality technology to draw extra attention to this story. The specific feature that was used to enable the AR projection is called SMART (Seamless Augmented Reality Tracking). Using Instant Tracking, ARKit and ARCore, SMART tracks the user’s surroundings, without any need of a special marker, and overlays digital interactive augmentations that are coherent and aligned with the physical environment.

Kat Downs, the director of product of The Washington Post, while speaking to Journalism.co.uk., said: “AR is really exciting, fun and different within news, and it is really right for exploration and experimenting.”.

See athletes race across your table or floor in 3D augmented reality on both Android and Apple devices. Users that already have the app, can go directly to The Speediest Winter Olympic sports to get started now.

Interested in creating an AR project of your own?
Talk to one of our specialists and learn how to get started.

Contact The Wikitude Team

View more success stories