Hatching ILMxLAB's Star Wars: Project Porg

If you want to do something huge, you can do it, but you need a really big space and not everyone has that. If you want to do something human-sized, it doesn’t come across as well to everybody. Really small things almost instantly give you this intimate feeling.” That made the porgs the perfect creature to focus on. “They’re things you want to take care of, things you’re not afraid to approach. (Porgs) can have a mind of their own, they can have their own opinions and desires. You can project a lot of emotion onto them and they’re just, they’re just really cute and mischievous.”

“For Magic Leap, one of the important things was to explore, ‘What does it mean to have meaningful character interaction in mixed reality?’” adds Elsayad. “There is something very emotionally and viscerally satisfying about having a character that pays attention to you in your own space in a way that I don’t think any other medium really comes close to.”

'Surprises'

To begin building the experience, the designers had to anticipate how people would interact with the tiny Ahch-To natives.

“You literally have to put it in front of as many eyes as possible,” says Elsayad. “There’s always going to be somebody who surprises you. Any one perspective is never enough. I remember someone at Magic Leap’s L.E.A.P. Conference playing porg golf,” he adds with a laugh. “That was not a thing that we really expected anybody to do. But because you can pick up the porg, what happens if I then use the porg to push stuff around? We quickly realized there’s interactions that you want to encourage and there’s patterns you want to find ways of discouraging. We eventually had to come up with a way of preventing people from shaking porgs.”

To date, the team has had over 150 testers explore the project as they fine tuned the details. “In the early days, we made this very simple first prototype and it’s surprising how close we ended up to that,” says Koperwas. “We had a couple of toys and the porgs would walk around and jump from location to location. The simplicity of the prototype was that it was made for a very specific space; everything was pre-built, but it was delightful.”

They also combed through video reference of real-world animals and footage of the porgs from The Last Jedi, created using a mix of physical effect puppets and CGI magic, to complete the effect. Although the experience is the first time fans will encounter an adolescent of the species, allowing artists working on the project to design the feathery, Mohawk-like tufts of a fuzzy porg offspring while also dabbling in recreating the adults and hatchlings seen on film.

“There are so many tricks that you can do in movies that you just can’t when they’re in the room with you,” says Elsayad. “The mechanics have to be right because you can look at it from every perspective, you can’t force the perspective so it has to be true to life.”

“Toe spread was very, very important,” Koperwas says, an essential step in giving the creature a natural-looking step off and landing. “They’re firmly planted. It gives them a greater sense of being actually on the ground.” But perfecting a porg hop proved to be a sticking point for the designers as they creatures meandered from surface to floor. “It’s something that you kind of think, ‘this should be as simple as can be,’” says Koperwas. But the effect relies on a perfect mix of animation, lightening, end environmental awareness triggered seamlessly by artificial intelligence technology.

Cat-like aloofness 

Pet birds, like budgies, and the original porg inspiration, the regal puffin, helped designers with movement. But they also looked to more common household pets. The porgs are essentially a cross between “the cat personality, being much more on their own and just kind of solitary and wanting to find a warm space and just hang out, and dogs that are much more anxious and eager to play and interact with you,” says Koperwas. “Being able to hold your hand out and have them follow your hand. Sometimes they run away, sometimes they preen a little bit.”

Elsayad, who has two cats at home, incorporated a laser pointer after seeing his own beloved pets go wild for the toy. It also serves as a solid example of how realistic the experience feels when you’re immersed in it. “On top of having porgs run around, which is obviously good fun, the laser pointer will stop at a wall, or on the ground or at a table, which further anchors the entire experience into your space.”

And Unreal Engine 4 helped engineers build the porgs’ artificial intelligence. “One of my favorite moments in the entire experience is when porgs start mimicking your head movement,” says Elsayad. “It’s one of the things that we kept coming back to. ‘How can we make the porgs pay more attention to you?’ And sometimes it’s just as simple as slowing things down and allowing the porgs to look at you in the eyes for a second before they do something. The difference in emotional response between a porg that’s trying to do something to impress you and a porg that just stops, turns at you, looks at you, smiles metaphorically and then does the thing is really powerful.”

The future is now

In the future, the team hopes mixed reality can be an added layer to the human experience of everyday life, used for entertainment in off hours or even a distraction on a long commute to work. Video calls connecting colleagues separated by time zones and vast oceans could transition into mixed reality. “I’m looking forward to being able to have a meeting where the people who are remote are actually sitting in that chair and aware of where I’m looking,” says Elsayad. “I can look them in the eye.”

“What I’m most interested in is this eventually emerging medium of telling stories over time,” adds Koperwas.  “We’re getting to this point where you can start to gain a relationship to a character and that story can be told through your direct relationship with that character. It’s no longer this sort of, ‘Oh they’re talking to the camera’ or breaking the fourth wall. No, it’s you. You’re part of the story. You are integral to it and we’re going on this story together.”

Koperwas expects that mixed reality will one day alter the way we lay out our homes, with rooms often configured around a glowing television screen. “And what that means for design, what that means for communication, eventually architecture as mixed reality gets more integral to our lives and becomes much more accessible, I think everything about the world is going to be very different from what we have now.”

But today, the team is just excited to see the first fans step into this larger world of porg caregiving. “One of the most profound joys is watching somebody else put on a headset and almost instantly forget that other people are there and just focus their attention on this new little creature that they’ve maybe wanted to meet for a long time,” Koperwas says. “That’s just the most heartwarming.”

Associate Editor Kristin Baver is a writer and all-around sci-fi nerd who always has just one more question in an inexhaustible list of curiosities. Sometimes she blurts out “It’s a trap!” even when it’s not. Do you know a fan who’s most impressive? Hop on Twitter and tell @KristinBaver all about them.

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