Facebook brings AR experience with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Facebook introduces AR experience with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Curtain Call, exclusively on Portal. The Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Curtain Call experience the user and three friends transform into characters from the play during Portal-to-Portal video calls. In addition to Curtain Call, you can hang out with your friends in Hogwarts Great Hall, the Ministry of Magic and the Edge of the Forbidden Forest during video calls or capture videos to share using Portal’s Photo Booth app. There are also 12 exclusive augmented reality (AR) masks of the most popular characters from the play available on Portal. NFans on Instagram and Facebook can still interact with the AR masks via each app’s camera and share video and photos via Stories.

Anyone can initiate the experience by tapping “Curtain Call” in the effects tray on Portal. You can then select one of three locations from the menu to visit: Hogwarts Great Hall, the Ministry of Magic or the Edge of the Forbidden Forest. When the lights come up, each person on the call will embody a character from the show with a unique spell, which is assigned randomly. Simply nod your head or tap the screen to cast it and watch as your friends marvel at the magic.

The technology uses real-time skin sampling that matches the 3D character to your unique skin tone before converting it into an AR mask for seamless integration. The AR masks and experiences are powered by Facebook’s Spark AR. We recently launched a version of this technology so AR creators can also build real-time social video calling experiences of their own. The Multipeer API includes shared environments or contexts, synchronized effects and even lightweight AR games.