Explorable virtual watch for Van Cleef & Arpels, built in WebAR
Working directly with Van Cleef and Arpels, we were challenged to make an augmented version of their incredible Lady Arpels Heures Florales Cerisier watch. The watches are so rare (and valuable!) that a virtual version was needed for potential customers to be able to investigate and get closer to the watch.
You tell the time by counting the number of open flowers on the watch face, then you use the scale on the side of the watch for the minutes. This elegant and simple system is shown in the ‘flow of time’ feature which timelapses the watch through it’s cycle.
The experience was built in Web AR on the 8th Wall platform, meaning anyone anywhere can scan the QR code and then point their phone at the image marker.
At this point the watch fades in to view and you can begin interacting with it. One of the key achievements in the project was having such a large and detailed model optimised for mobile download – this whole project is just over 10Mb!
You may also notice that the watch tells the live time, the entire thing is rigged, all the parts move as they do on the actual watch – this allows us to remove file size from animations and instead to programmatically tell the time.
Try the experience for yourself by scanning this QR code below and using the image as a tracker:
