'Paw-gmented’ reality: Developing an AR Pudsey Bear for BBC Children in Need

BBC Research & Development has been working with emerging immersive and interactive technologies for many years and more recently we’ve been working with Radio 1 to explore the potential of music acts performing in virtual environments to play live gigs to fans who can join as avatars.

To support the recent BBC Children in Need appeal, we worked with our partners Condense Reality and Aer Studios to develop 'Pudsey’s Big Thank You'.

This augmented reality (AR) experience is presented to people when they donate money to the appeal online. After making a contribution users can scan a QR code on their donation certificate to access the mobile experience. Then, as if by magic, an adorable 3D Pudsey Bear will appear in the space in front of you to deliver a personal thank you.

The experience gives audiences a new and exciting dimension of interactivity with that special bear, helping to broaden BBC Children in Need's reach and grow awareness with younger audiences. Easy and fun to use, parents and children can enjoy having a little bit of Pudsey in their homes all together.

Using the same technology that powered the multi-awardwinning BBC Radio 1 Big Virtual Weekend and Rave Lounge events, this time it was Pudsey who performed in the volumetric capture area. This ensured every movement and pad of his paws was picked up using Condense’s tech, and Pudsey’s moves were then transformed into a 3D model.

3D Pudsey was then projected into people’s homes and viewed from any angle via the AR app that was developed by Aer and Condense. Using only a mobile device, donors scan a QR code to access the AR experience to place Pudsey in their home, move around him, change his size, and enjoy a light-hearted, uplifting interaction created especially for the appeal.

Building AR experiences with volumetric video is a demanding challenge on mobile devices. It involves handling massive 3D video datasets and working with low-level codecs to ensure smooth playback. Also, support for WebXR - the standard for AR and VR in browsers - varies across operating systems. This poses a challenge for development if we are to meet the BBC’s commitment to accessibility and universality:

• Android: Chrome supports WebXR with native ARCore integration, making true WebAR possible in the browser.
• iOS: Safari does not provide ARKit API access to WebXR, creating major limitations for browser-based AR.

However, Apple’s App Clips offer a practical workaround to make mobile AR experiences possible on iOS devices. App Clips act as lightweight, instant versions of an app that mimic native API integrations, delivering smoother AR experiences and better performance, even on lower-end devices. While App Clips have size limits, these apply only to the app logic, not the content, making large-scale AR experiences remain possible by streaming assets after the clip loads.

Variant Launch - the technology we used in Pudsey’s Big Thank You - uses native WebXR support on Android and using App Clips as a workaround for iOS making WebAR experiences possible across both platforms. This is a good balance between user experience and ease of development across as many devices as possible, with the option of a 2D Pudsey video version for devices that aren’t supported.

It will be interesting to see how interactive and immersive technologies develop over the next few years. 8th Wall, one of the most widely used WebAR platforms, recently announced it will close by 2027, leaving a gap in browser-based AR experiences. This may lead to a shift where WebXR (representing the official W3C standards for immersive experiences including AR, VR, and mixed reality, rather than the narrower concept of WebAR) is combined with native API support for improved performance and interoperability across all operating systems.