Once upon a time, there was an AR storytelling application called Creatikal. It was born from the hearts and minds of Jorge Duarte Ruiz, co-founder and CEO, and Sarah Gatefield, co-founder and CTO, while discussing their love of cinema and virtual reality and wanting to combine the two. Conversations that started with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” lead to hours of brainstorming, sketching, ideating, validating and now what they have in the form of Creatikal.
While incubated at Oarsis, a venture builder of immersive technologies based in Madrid, they validated problems and opportunities following the Lean Startup Method, wireframed ideas, came up with a solution, believed in their dream, convinced some lovely souls to help them make it and built prototypes on both iOS and Android – harnessing the power and recent uptake of ARKit and ARCore – all in less than four months. It’s been a rollercoaster ride to say the least.
Jorge Duarte Ruiz is an ideasmith, having more than 13 years experience in business development, marketing and brand communication. He is specialised in storytelling and has worked with agencies and clients as an independent consultant and as a trainer. He loves folktales and fables, and now with Creatikal, he can make them real.
Sarah Gatefield has started this augmented reality adventure after eight years working in the VFX industry for cinema and television with companies such as ILM, Framestore and Trixter, and was Head of Matchmove at Double Negative TV. Over the last two years she has taught herself coding, editing 360 videos, and developing in Unity to make VR and AR experiences. She believes in the power of technology and using it creatively for social good.
Creatikal is about telling stories with both real and virtual elements interacting together to create new environments, just like you acted out when you were a child; you imagined the bath was the sea, and the bookcase was a mountain. Creatikal will allow people of all ages to develop their emotional intelligence by using storytelling in order to express themselves and education can be more creative and understood when seeing a history lesson literally played out in front of the class. The applications of this new platform are numerous; from entertainment to marketing and advertising, from creativity to learning.
Ultimately, Creatikal want to give children and adults the tools to make their imagination real. They are doing the same.
