Six Flags’ Carowinds has introduced cutting-edge technology from Illumix for family-friendly entertainment with the launch of Camp Snoopy Bird Watcher’s Club.
The augmented reality (AR) experience is available exclusively in the Carowinds mobile app. And it digitally brings the beloved Peanuts world to life within the landscape of Camp Snoopy at an amusement park.
Owned by Six Flags, Carowinds is a 400-acre amusement park located on the North Carolina-South Carolina state line, is home to top-rated roller coasters, including Fury 325, the world’s tallest and fastest giga coaster, as well as more than 58 rides, attractions, and live stage shows.
While AR took a backseat to AI in the past couple years, Kirin Sinha, CEO of Illumix, believes that this will start to change as AR tech improves.
“The AI wave that has been so explosive around multimodal lately has been pushing into wearables, which in turn, has had this interesting, interesting intersection with what we do,” Sinha said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. “We connect people in the real world to information and experiences that are contextually relevant.”
While waiting to board select attractions, guests use their smartphone camera to complete challenges, test their skills and climb atop the leaderboard. Each game ties seamlessly into select Camp Snoopy attractions, adding depth and excitement to the story.
Five AR games are available to play now, including Beagle Scout Ceremony, Photo Hunt, Scout Splash, Critter Catcher and Hide & Seek.
Additional AR games are on the way when two new rides, Snoopy’s Racing Railway and Charlie Brown’s River Raft Blast, open this summer.
Using a cutting-edge Visual Positioning System (VPS), Camp Snoopy Bird Watcher’s Club reacts dynamically to the surrounding environment, adapting to lighting and time of day. The immersive AR experience seamlessly blends the physical world with the digital, creating a next-level attraction for families to enjoy.
One of the highlights of the experience, Hide & Seek, utilizes the Bird Watcher’s Clubhouse, a physical birdhouse set in Camp Snoopy. Guests play along as digital Beagle Scouts flutter in and out of the birdhouse, offering a fun and engaging experience while waiting for rides.
Origins
Sinha spun the tech out of Stanford University’s computer science department in 2017. For a while, the company was focused on AR gaming. Now the team is taking its spatial engine and focusing on the business of commercializing it alongside larger enterprises working on things like location-based entertainment.
Illumix is a 32-person startup that has been focusing on foundational AR technology for eight years. Illumix is the leader in AR for location-based experiences – with proprietary technology that makes the digital layer highly precise, robust to changing real world conditions, and privacy-centric.
“Now we can talk about some of our live activations like with Six Flags,” Sinha said. “There is a wider ecosystem pushing towards AR glasses.
Illumix has worked with many of the top IPs including Peanuts, Harry Potter, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Disney, and has powered hundreds of millions of AR interactions. Sinha sees a sharp increase in interest and adoption of AR / XR, driven in part by the popularity of Meta/RayBan and Snap Spectacles.
On top of that, venue-based AR is also seeing increased momentum. Illumix has kicked off a new Camp Snoopy experience with Six Flags and is also working with Disney, MGM, UBS / Verizon and others.
Sinha said the company started talking with Six Flags more than a year ago. The team started producing the experience with Woodstock in the fourth quarter of 2024.
“It started with Peanuts, and they have been wonderful and incredibly supportive partners,” Sinha said. “I think they were willing to talk because of the precision of the system. The way traditional visual positioning systems work is very pixel to pixel.”
Sinha added, “You take a map, or a scan of a space, and then basically it tries to match that to what your camera is seeing at a high level. That’s what the entire algorithm is doing. But it has never taken off because the idea that the world is totally static is not real. Variability is the default. The problem and the opportunity is no other system that can work in those conditions and keep it accurate and keep it stable. We do it with a single scan and it works in every condition.”
How it works
Camp Snoopy Bird Watcher’s Club was developed in collaboration with Illumix, a leader in immersive AR technology.
With new AR experiences, two exciting new rides coming to Camp Snoopy and Carolina Harbor Shore Club opening this summer, Carowinds is turning up the heat. The ultimate way to play is with a 2025 Silver Pass, which includes unlimited visits and free parking through Labor Day.
For a limited time, guests can get a 2025 Silver Pass for just $95. Six Flags Entertainment owns 27 amusement parks, 15 water parks and nine resort properties across 17 states in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It has rights to theme park intellectual property such as Peanuts.
With Illumix’s technology, Camp Snoopy is able to tell stories in new ways that puts the guest as the main character – letting them interact and affect the world around them.
Illumix uses spatial intelligence in AR to create hyper-precise immersive experiences that are anchored in the world and integrate into its surroundings. This technology is a huge step above previous versions of AR that require QR codes, are contextually unaware, or leverage GPS / beacons, Sinha said.
These experiences often just “float” in space, but don’t truly integrate into their surroundings – severely limiting their immersion and the creative possibilities.
By leveraging an advanced version of a Visual Positioning System (VPS) that Illumix has developed over the past eight years, Illumix has allowed Camp Snoopy to bring high-fidelity digital experiences into their physical environment.
Notably, these experiences work from all angles and are accurate to the centimeter. They localize to an environment in sub-one second across devices. They are robust enough to work throughout the day with changing lighting conditions and even scene changes (for example, day to night). This is particularly relevant in real-world settings and theme parks where environments are often changing – Illumix doesn’t require these areas be remapped each time.
And they allow guests to engage in social, interactive experiences, while also allowing for more personalized experiences.
The Illumix SDK is optimized and is integrated directly from the main apps, and can be easily scaled across different Six Flags and Camp Snoopy park experiences.
Early results
The AR activations at Carowinds has quickly become a guest favorite, with strong engagement and repeat usage:
High Engagement: On average, each guest tries 3.44 of the 5 AR experiences available — and more than half return to engage with AR again, showing sustained interest across their time at the park.
Strong Repeat Usage: Among returning park guests, engagement remains high — with a 95.37% stickiness ratio, indicating consistent interaction with AR across multiple days.
Transforming the Guest Journey: The top-performing experiences — Hide and Seek and Photo Hunt — transform everything from queue lines to physical set pieces using Illumix’s proprietary visual positioning system (VPS), creating a dynamic new layer of interactivity within the park.
“We are always listening to our guests as we create new experiences for Carowinds;” said Ken Parks, director of creative development for Six Flags Entertainment Corporation, in a statement. “Many families have asked for ways to entertain little ones while in line.”
Parks added, “Camp Snoopy Bird Watchers Club provides that opportunity, letting campers play their wait away before boarding our fun-filled attractions. We have an excellent, long-standing relationship with Peanuts, and together we are thrilled to bring this one-of-a-kind experience to our guests.”
The vision
Sinha said that, previously, AR in theme parks has been limited because the technology couldn’t truly integrate digital and physical in a way that was accurate and robust. Illumix’s technology allows it to create new breeds of attraction – and even opens the possibility of social experiences and personalized ones.
“In the future, as we move towards glasses, this digital layer will be prevalent and ever-changing as a part of every location-based entertainment experience,” Sinha said.
It took Illumix approximately three months to develop these experiences. Illumix successfully developed these experiences while the physical spaces were still under construction. By harnessing advanced rapid mapping technology, the team was able to complete quick, accurate mapping late in the process.
“We have seen a huge appetite from guests, particularly younger guests around digital engagement in parks,” Sinha said.
Over 60% of theme park guests are digital natives, and 80% of under 18 year olds consider themselves gamers. They expect to be able to impact the world around them, and their vision of an immersive experience goes beyond just settings & rides and into interactive storytelling throughout.
There are multiple projects under way in different places of the world like in the Middle East and the U.S., Sinha said.
In places like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the young folks are immersed in technology as digital natives, Sinha said. The main use case is entertainment and gamification, like with the Six Flags example. Another use is utility-focused, such as wayfinding or visual discovery in hospitality venues.
With retail having a hard time filling spaces, AR activities could become ways to bring people out to a venue where people could play games in a space that might otherwise be moribund.
“The re-engagement part is actually a critical part of the experience,” Sinha said. “We can drive people to stay longer, spend more, have a better time and a higher satisfaction.”
And Sinha said customers are selling the AR service as a monetized experience, like how museums can make money by selling audio tours to guests.