London, UK – WildBrain Spark, the digital media division of WildBrain, one of the world’s largest independent kids’ and family entertainment companies, is making its first foray into augmented reality.

Teaming up with South Korean AR specialist ANIPEN, characters from WildBrain’s Teletubbies, In the Night Garden and the original WildBrain Spark’s show Boy & Dragon will be brought to life through ANIPEN’s AR technology and made available within their AnibeaR app. Through the app, users will be able to create short videos which will incorporate the characters in real-world scenes shot on their phones. These videos can then be shared via social media. The project is currently in development and the characters are due to launch on AnibeaR in Korea, Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia later this year. Anipen’s top mobile app has been “Pororo World”, which had 400,000 downloads in June, according to SensorTower. It also had a licensed “Alice in Wonderland 3D” game in 2014 and has 30 apps for iOS (18) and Android (12) systems.

Jon Gisby, Managing Director of WildBrain Spark, said: “This is a ground-breaking project for WildBrain Spark as we use immersive technology to allow kids and families to create their own stories with our globally recognised characters. We are excited about the possibilities of AR and look forward to bringing our favourite characters to life through ANIPEN’s unrivalled technology.”

Jaewoong Jeon, CEO of ANIPEN, added: “We are committed to bringing next-generation augmented reality content that provides bold new experiences for users, such as interactive AR technology that combines our technical expertise with the family characters audiences know and love. With a portfolio of popular and internationally successful brands such as Teletubbies, In the Night Garden and Boy & Dragon, we’re very excited to be teaming up with WildBrain Spark and to take their characters into the world of AR.”

Based in South Korea, ANIPEN Inc. is an augmented reality startup that was founded in 2013 and developed an interactive augmented reality content-authoring engine to help global companies at home and abroad in technology and content. The AnibeaR app was developed and serviced in-house at ANIPEN and was also selected as the Best of AR in Google Play in 2019.

For more information, please contact:

WildBrain Spark: Aimee Norman at DDA Blueprint PR
aimee@ddablueprint.com  +44 (0) 7957 564 050

About WildBrain Spark

WildBrain Spark builds brands through the management and creation of preschool and children’s entertainment content on platforms such as YouTube, Amazon Video Direct and ROKU. WildBrain Spark’s branded YouTube network is one of the largest of its kind, featuring more than 300,000 videos for more than 800 kids’ channels in over 30 languages. Every 90 days, one in every three kids worldwide with access to YouTube watches video content on the WildBrain Spark network, which has over 168 million subscribers, and approximately 4 billion views per month.

Connecting kids’ content owners and creators with advertisers in the Advertising Video-on-Demand (AVOD) space, the WildBrain Spark network features much of WildBrain’s own library of approximately 13,000 half-hours of kids’ and family content, including Peanuts, Teletubbies, Strawberry Shortcake, Caillou, Inspector Gadget, Degrassi and Yo Gabba Gabba!, as well as popular third-party brands such as Fireman Sam, Spookiz, Hairdorables and Ben 10.

WildBrain Spark Studios also specializes in the creation of new, original content for its network, such as animated and live-action shorts; toy-play and stop-motion videos; preschool counting and alphabet videos; nursery rhymes and more.

About ANIPEN

ANIPEN develops an innovative, patented authoring technology for producing interactive digital AR (augmented reality) content. This technology does not require existing VFX programs and allows a simple multimodal interaction method for smart devices.

General users can create personalized interactive 3D augmented content through multimodal interactive motions such as touching, drawing and gesturing. These motion sequences are overlaid with the real world, in real time.

ANIPEN believes that simplicity is essential to improve users’ AR content experience. ANIPEN’s easy-to-use technology allows general users to enjoy both augmented digital content and experience zones, which in turn expands the content market.