• by Amy Corr , Staff Writer @MediaPostOTL, April 4, 2011

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and apparently an ideal time to target kids with an augmented reality campaign. This international campaign promotes "Rio," a 20^th Century Fox animated film voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, George Lopez, Jane Lynch and Jamie Foxx, among others. Eisenberg and Hathaway voice two rare macaws that are kidnapped by poachers. 

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Blue Sky Studio hired a software company, Dassault Systèmes, to create an augmented reality campaign to support the animated movie.

The AR campaign is featured on 26 million Nestle cereal boxes, in 53 countries and in 29 languages. North America, however, is not included in the list.

Each cereal box includes the AR game, plastic whistles and a CD-ROM of digital games. On the back of each box is a section for kids to cut out and use to interact with characters from "Rio."  Kids take the cut-out section to their computer and webcam to appear onscreen with main character Rio, one of the macaws, himself. Users can take a small cup of bird food and drop pellets on a dish, a record turntable or atop a globe that sends Rio spinning the globe to maintain his footing. Rio can also appear to be resting on a flower being held by the AR user. 

The campaign took three months to make and customer incentives vary by country. It's also up to each country how much the campaign is promoted. Nestle created a boilerplate TV ad, but every country doesn't need to use it.

"The biggest campaign challenge was matching real-time 3D animations to the animation quality of 'Rio,' the movie," says Mehdi Tayoubi, Director of Interactive Strategy, Dassault Systèmes. 

"There are a lot of technical constraints for 3D interactive and online games, like the global weight of the application, [and] like being sure that it can work on a non-gaming PC," says Tayoubi. We had to take into account those technical constraints and to give life to the movie heroes with a 'movie-like' quality in real-time interactions."