Pū Rākau AR

PAKU Pū Rākau AR Companion App

Experience the magic of Te Ao Māori! The PAKU Pū Rākau companion app brings your physical wooden blocks to life through interactive Augmented Reality (AR).

AR Mode: Scan the individual wooden blocks to reveal the atua (Māori deities) in beautiful, animated form! Watch as the stories and characters of the atua come alive, reinforcing their unique characteristics. Try combining different atua blocks to see how their digital stories and characters interact.

ATUA Mode: Explore the full collection of atua virtually, even without the physical blocks! This mode allows you to view the characters and their animations anytime, anywhere.

Making Māori Culture Interactive and Fun

We've noticed that many resources for teaching Māori culture and language lack interactivity and fun. That's why we created PAKU Pū Rākau blocks. Our goal is simple: to make learning the Māori alphabet and stories enjoyable and engaging for children. We've taken mātauranga Māori and blended it with the latest technology, bringing Māori and New Zealand design into the future.

We're thrilled to introduce PAKU Pū Rākau, a project that aims to revolutionise how children connect with Māori knowledge. It's born out of our deep passion to bring the rich world of Te Ao Māori into the homes of all families in Aotearoa. Join us on this exciting journey!

We are tech and design nerds at heart and while this was always going to be a future product for PAKU it wasn't at the top of the list. Then that lightbulb moment when asking ourselves "How do we make the mātauranga more accessible, and more engaging?" We are building an interactive augmented reality app, so that tamariki can play and interact with the stories in both the physical and digital worlds.

In their own right the blocks are a beautiful representation of each atua but when stacked and then scanned in the digital world the atua come to life with elements that reinforce their story and character. Try to combine different atua whose stories overlap and see the interaction between the two.