Ricola Herb Hunt: Flying Through the Swiss Alps in Real-Time 3D

The brief

Ricola wanted to excite fans across Asia with a campaign that combined product storytelling, a new brand character “Bumble” the bee, and a high-value incentive: a meet-and-greet with brand ambassador Park Seo Jun in Korea. The challenge was to create an interactive experience that not only dramatized Ricola’s heritage of Swiss herbs, but also worked seamlessly across APAC markets on mobile devices, from premium handsets to older, slower connections.

What we built

UNCANNY built Herb Hunt, an interactive WebGL experience that transported users into the Swiss Alps as Bumble. Players explored a fully rendered 3D world, collecting Ricola’s five famous herbs to enter the sweepstakes.

To bring Bumble to life, we developed a custom rendering technique that rebuilt the character not as a traditional 3D mesh, but as a layered composition of multiple 2D planes. This gave Bumble a soft, “fuzzy” realism closer to an actual bee’s texture, while remaining lightweight enough for mobile browsers. Advanced shader programming simulated fur depth, light scattering, and atmospheric effects across the alpine environment. A combination of procedural layering, LOD scaling, and aggressive texture compression kept the experience performant, ensuring smooth frame rates and sub-5-second load times even on older devices.

Results

The result was a technically ambitious but highly accessible game, one that blended Ricola’s heritage, product storytelling, and playful character design into an immersive digital adventure. Herb Hunt gave consumers across Asia a new way to engage with Ricola, turning Bumble and the brand’s iconic herbs into the heroes of a truly memorable experience.