We’re proud to have partnered with Cheeky Little to help bring the Vegesaurs Immersive Experience to life at Luna Park Sydney.
We’ve been working on large-scale immersive experiences for a while now, and it’s always a privilege to be able to share our skills and expertise with others in the industry.
Recently, we had the chance to do just that when the team over at Cheeky Little came to us with a big idea. They wanted to take their wildly popular TV show ‘Ginger and the Vegesaurs’ to the next level by transforming it into the world’s largest game of hide-and-seek.
This was a project that would bring together innovative immersive storytelling and cutting-edge technology in a spectacular spatial experience. Using spatial audio and content mapping across 39 projectors we would bring the Vegesaurs world to life like never before.
One-of-a-kind Vegesaurs adventure
The Vegesaurs Immersive Experience invites audiences to join their favorite characters to run, swim and fly through the stunning environments of Vegesaur Valley. Visitors will find themselves in lush jungles, epic volcanoes, snowy mountains and underwater gardens as they race against time to find missing friends and learn the identities of a mysterious new Vegesaur.
According to the directors at Cheeky Little, David Webster and Patrick Egerton, this new immersive experience was about creating a unique experience for Australian audiences.
It’s all about sparking kids’ imaginations and creating a space where the whole family can share the experience.
Safe to say that this ambition, to extend the world of an iconic Australian show into an immersive experience filled with vibrant animated characters and epic natural landscapes, was right up our alley.
A partnership of purpose
Bringing this magical world to life would require a deep understanding of immersive content design, not to mention some heavy lifting when it came to technical implementation.
Given our recent work on Antopia with Melbourne Museum and Guardians of Tomorrow with Dubai World Expo, our team was well-placed to support Cheeky Little on both of these fronts.
Adapting Vegesaurs for an immersive canvas
The first thing to do was get our head around the project. By now, Cheeky Little had a solid story and good creative direction. But they needed to make sure that their creative would transfer well into a more immersive world. Which is where we came in.
When telling an immersive story, more is almost never better. These kinds of experiences happen all around you and so, by definition, there will always be a lot going on. And that can be overwhelming for visitors, not to mention hard to follow. It’s important to keep the actual story quite simple, and instead give audiences the space to take in the environment around them.
So our main change to the creative was to encourage Cheeky Little to reduce the sheer amount of content. We wanted to give each scene ample time to breathe, allowing visitors to not only follow the story but revel in the story world unfolding around them.
Renovations at a classic Luna Park venue
Large-scale immersive experiences can’t be deployed just anywhere. There’s not only the requirement of a large space, but also of all the technology and infrastructure needed to run this kind of experience.
Lucky for us, Luna Park Sydney has recently undergone a significant transformation. In addition to being an amusement park, the venue has realised an opportunity to become a leader in future modes of entertainment – particularly immersive experiences.
We know that globally, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha are craving friendly, highly social, highly engaging digital experiences.
As part of this, they’ve renovated their Big Top venue into an immersive arena, complete with spatial audio and a network of 39 projectors. Perfect for something like the Venesaurs Immersive Experience.
An nDisplay framework for immersive content
In order to take full advantage of the immersive venue, Cheeky Little needed to be able to adapt their content from a standard screen format to the non-standard architectural canvas of the Big Top.
The first step was to create a 3D model of the venue in Unreal Engine. Lucky for us, ‘Ginger and the Vegesaurs’ is already made using a real-time pipeline, meaning the animation team would be familiar with this kind of working setup.
Next we used nDisplay to create virtual surfaces of the space, mapping the display areas with the available projection infrastructure. This would allow the animation team to pre-visualise their content as projected onto the venue in the editor, an invaluable tool in mapping out the different environments and where the action would happen.
We also made sure to align this setup with the content templates required by the media server at Luna Park Sydney. This meant we could limit the amount of encoding necessary before the files could be used.
Creating a virtual reality testing system
Another key consideration early in the process was a bit more primal: nausea. The team at Cheeky Little were used to working in a TV format, where audiences are watching a single screen. However for this experience, the ‘screen’ would be all around our audience.
The problem here is that when the content all around you is moving, but you are not. Anyone who’s worked in virtual reality will have encountered this issue. Which is precisely why we decided to build a VR testing tool to help the Cheeky Little team during production.
Being able to test how content will look within an immersive space well before actually implementing it in that space really can make all the difference. It allows creatives and developers alike to get a much better feel for how the content works and what needs to change than is possible on a 2D screen.
We’d used a similar process when developing our interactive experience for the Dubai World Expo. For that project, virtual reality was made necessary given that our development team was based in Australia while the actual experience was being deployed in Dubai. But it nonetheless reinforced the value of being able to prototype content in a 3D environment early on in the process.
A new immersive experience at Luna Park Sydney
Initially launched on 11 January 2025, the Vegesaurs Immersive Experience transports young children and their families into a magical prehistoric world where they can join their favourite characters in a one-of-a-kind adventure.
An incredible sensory experience.
Vegesaurs have been taken to the next level!
My kids loved every minute of the show.
With tickets in hot demand, the 45-minute experience continues to run daily at Luna Park Sydney’s classic Big Top. Tickets can be found on the Luna Park Sydney website.
If you’re interested in creating a one-of-a-kind experience or transforming a story into an immersive adventure, we would love to hear from you at creative@s1t2.com.
