New Game Show Goes Virtual In 2016

These days, game shows are pretty basic, featuring a live audience, an interactive set-up where contestants could win big prizes, and a host with plenty of personality – we’re looking at you, Alex Trebek. However, next year, The Future Group could change how we look at game shows forever.

VentureBeat has reported that the Oslo, Norway-based company has managed to raise $8.5 million for a new virtual game show that it intends to launch next year. Co-founder Bard Anders Kasin confirmed the project with Gamesbeat earlier this week, indicating that the team was working with an unnamed game show production company on the project.

Kasin is no stranger to gaming technology, as he worked as a technical director for Warner Bros. and also utilized game-oriented technologies with The Matrix films. “We saw gaming applied to the film pipeline, and since then we have seen a huge change in what we were able to do in real time,” he explained. “This is the accumulation of dreams that people had for many years. And the technology is finally there to do it.”

The project is set to launch as a game show in prime time sometime next year, on a yet undisclosed network. It will feature a virtual world that can be accessed through a number of desktop and mobile devices, enabling the audience to play along and perhaps throw a few challenges at the contestants.

Although The Future Group can’t yet show off what it’s doing – the screenshot above is just a hint of the concept – it intends to blend live video of actors blending in with a virtual world almost seamlessly. “There are so many different markets involved,” said Kasin. “We have people spread through Europe with a lot of partner companies. You have TV, games, studio systems and the eCommerce platform. We’re trying to make it brilliant because we know we have to do that in order to succeed.

“In The Matrix movies, you had people moving into a virtual world, and we’re kind of doing the same thing now.”

The show will utilize Unity based game technology to create the virtual world, using motion trackers to keep track of players’ movements so that they can interact with items with very little error. “We put Unity in the film production pipeline to make the process happen in real time,” said Kasin. “We are building an entire online world. You can compete against the TV show contestants while the show is airing. But you can also just play in the game world. The more you compete, the more chances you have for prizes.”

It sounds like a lot of promise, but if The Future Group can pull it off, it’ll change the way we look at game shows forever. Even with Alex Trebek.

Twitch and Old Spice Team For Live-Streaming Promotion

Just over a year ago, Twitch hosted a wildly popular Twitch Plays Pokémon event, in which streamers could control an on-screen character by typing in commands to the user chat. Over 70,000 people took part in that promotion, and though following events haven’t drawn as big an audience, they continue to bring in enough of a collective following to make them worthwhile.

This week, these users will get their chance to test out this system on someone entirely different – a human being.

Twitch has announced that it has teamed up with Old Spice and Procter & Gamble to launch a new promotion that kicks off on April 16. “The Old Spice Nature Adventure” will follow a human male as he ventures into the woods, following certain commands given to him from people in the chat room. Although not everything will be considered, it will allow people the opportunity to go a little nuts. Hidden booby-traps and silly gags will also be thrown in to keep things interesting, according to TechCrunch. This includes talking trees and a bear that isn’t afraid to arm wrestle.

A narrator will recap the events as they happen, following the same style as the popular “Look At Your Man” commercials.

This is an interesting approach for an ad campaign, taking the successful Twitch Plays Pokémon format and applying it to a native ad format. Still, it continues in the trend of Old Spice’s offbeat ad campaigns as of late, ranging from Terry Crews doing a number of things with his muscles (ranging from explosions to playing musical instruments) to strange things happening in nature – like a bear inadvertently delivering Old Spice products on his tongue, as seen in the video below.