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Last year saw a new Terminator movie where we saw John Connor send Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect his mother. Play Nicely, an interactive marketing agency based in Bristol went on a worldwide tour with a Kinect and a booth giving passers by the ability to turn into a “personalised liquid metal T-1000”. They followed this tour and the release of the movie with a browser based experience which allowed anyone to take a selfie and see a personalised video of them turning into a T-800.

Play Nicely and I have worked together in the past a few times on HTML5 apps and browser based experiences doing image manipulation and customisation so I was excited to be able to join them on the browser build.

The app took the user through a few steps:

1. They chose a poster or video
2. Take a selfie using a built in camera or select a photo from Facebook
3. Align their face to a template S4. hare or download their personalised image

The app worked as a responsive HTML5 website across mobile devices, tablets and desktop computers.

Ok, I admit testing on this project was a little more fun than your usual CMS! It’s pretty funny to see what comes out when you map the 3D face vertices to the wrong part of the image. It’s exciting working with the Play Nicely team, the breadth of skill across the different technologies is very seldom found under one roof and they are passionate about squeezing every ounce of creativity out of each project which is refreshing.

We’ve been able to apply the same core code to a few projects now and I’m sure simple fan engagement campaigns like this will continue to be popular. If you’re interested in doing something similar take a look at their microsite about the technique and what you can do at reface.io.