Furry - Design of Augmented Reality Blind Box

Furry fandom becomes an influential sub-culture in social media among the young generation. More and more people love anthropomorphic animal characters and like to engage in magical thinking, the fantasy activities like a furry animal. However, the furry content or activities are mainly based offline, on the website, or scatter on social media. It is hard to find a mobile-based platform for furry fans to create, share, and exchange. In addition, the blind box industry develops quickly, which grabs the imagination of young consumers and raises incredible social excitement. However, the physical version of the blind box has various limitations, such as delivery, space occupation, expense, etc. Inspired by the needs of furry fans and the concept of a blind box, we develop a platform named ‘FURRY’ - a creative, fantasy, and interactive platform for the creation, sharing, and monetization of the animal-themed virtual blind box based on augmented reality technology and social media. Users can collect random parts of a virtual animal from the blind box and wear them to become an anthropomorphic animal character they prefer. In this paper, the whole structure of the platform is discussed. The four sections of FURRY including obtaining, playing, building fursona, and mine are introduced in detail. Then the markerless AR applied in the project is discussed. Two stages preprocessing and real-time processing are introduced to create an interactive user experience. The results of the present research are expected to help vitalize and expand the practice of AR-based culture content.