Thursday, 25 July, 2024 UTC
Summary
A new mini golf course in virtual reality starts at West Wallaby Street before winding through Wallace & Gromit's home.
Developers from Mighty Coconut took a walkabout through the course with UploadVR.
0:00
/1:37
1×
The full 22-minute tour video offers Wallace & Gromit fans worldwide a chance to peek inside the theme park version of one of the most well-known homes in animation. Mighty Coconut 3D Modeler Edward Felix and Senior Art Director Don Carson offered behind-the-scenes details on the tour of the latest course in Walkabout Mini Golf, explaining how they animated Wallace & Gromit in a stop motion style that makes you feel like you're in their world.
"Wallace is always putting together a new business. Well, Wallace is building this mini golf course," Felix said. "He's basing this on what he has to hand. He's decked out the van with his golf course decorations. You can see over at the front gate, there is the putters and the balls that you would need to come in and play a mini golf course. So this level more than anything else has really been constructed as it would have been constructed by Wallace."
Walkabout Mini Golf is one of VR's best games. It features room codes for cross-platform multiplayer support and there are also guest passes so friends can play together in paid downloadable courses like Wallace & Gromit, even if only one person in your group bought the course. Wallace & Gromit's creators, Aardman, join a growing list of partners for Mighty Coconut including Jim Henson's Labyrinth, Cyan, Meow Wolf and, in 2025, Elvis Presley.
"Something that's interesting we've discovered in a lot of our IPs, whether it was Meow Wolf or it was Cyan working on Myst or working with Nick Park, is that everybody at some point early on in their creative career fantasized doing a miniature golf course, and then we arrive with this opportunity to deliver upon that dream," Carson said. "And so it was no different with Aardman. They've always fantasized this idea of doing a Wallace & Gromit mini golf park. So it just fit in perfectly with what we had planned on doing for this course."
https://youtu.be/Djczs6UeP4w
62 West Wallaby Street features an enormous amount of animation from Mighty Coconut, including dozens of sheep in night mode. Some inventions and holes were inspired directly by Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park's collaboration with Mighty Coconut. Ben Whitehead, the voice actor for Wallace since Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, also voices the character in Walkabout.
Walkabout Mini Golf is available on Quest, Steam, Pico and PSVR 2 headsets with an iOS version in testing.