What TG4 wanted
TG4, the Irish-language broadcaster, wanted people to experience Irish stories in augmented reality straight from a scan, with nothing to download first. Point a phone at a code and the content should come alive on the spot.
The problem worth naming
People do not download an app for a one-off moment. If getting to the AR meant a trip to the app store first, most of the audience would drop off before they ever saw it, and the moment TG4 wanted to create would never happen at all. So the experience had to run straight in the phone's own browser, with no install step in between the scan and the story.
That decision brings its own catch. A browser has no dedicated AR engine to lean on the way a native app or a social platform's filter does, and it has to work on whatever phone someone happens to be holding, not just the newest one. Older phones, slower connections, a person standing in front of a poster with patience for one tap and no more — the experience had to hold up under all of that, not just under test conditions.
What we built
Scan a code and the AR opens instantly in the phone's browser, no app and no barrier in the way. From a poster or a screen, that scan turns into a live AR moment in seconds, built around custom 3D and motion rather than a stock effect dropped on top of a marker.
- Scan a code, the AR opens instantly in the browser
- Custom 3D assets and animation built for the piece
- Optimised to run smoothly across old and new phones alike
- Goes from a poster or screen to a live AR moment in seconds
How it was made
Browser-based WebAR has no app to fall back on, so the 3D assets and the animation had to carry the whole experience on their own and still load fast over a phone's browser rather than a native app's runtime. We built the assets and the motion to feel like a finished piece of storytelling rather than a novelty bolted onto a marker, then optimised it to hold up across a spread of handsets, old and new, rather than tuning it for whichever phone happened to be on the test bench. Getting from a code on a poster or a screen to a moving, three-dimensional piece of AR in a few seconds, on an ordinary phone browser, is the part that is easy to describe and hard to get right.
What shipped
TG4's WebAR experience went live: scan and go, in the browser, on any phone, no app required. There are no download or view figures published for this one, so that is where the story stops.