Minecraft supports Great Ormond Street Hospital with virtual winter wonderland

The world’s largest winter festival has opened its virtual doors to the public to experience Christmas festivities – all in a Minecraft world.

Covering an area with a representative size of over 155,000 square metres or 38 acres, the virtual wonderland is four times the size of the biggest real-world seasonal event in Austria and took specialist artist Ushio Tokura over 300 hours and more than 30 million individual blocks to complete.

Commissioned by NVIDIA, the NVIDIA RTX Winter World will give families across the globe a free festive immersive experience to explore, which exceeds its real-world counterparts in scale, that visitors can enjoy from the comfort of their own homes. It will also offer an opportunity to raise funds for NVIDIA’s charity partner, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity (GOSH Charity).

Utilising NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPU’s (Graphics Processing Unit), real-time ray tracing stunningly simulates the physical behaviour of light, enabling reflections, shadows and other realistic lighting effects, as visitors are transported to a world offering a full winter wonderland and Santa’s grotto experience.

The world includes roller coasters, a Christmas village, frozen ice-skating lake, penguin postal service and petting zoo tent, with playable storylines and quests. Christmas film aficionados should also keep a lookout for Easter Egg homages to famous festive flicks such as ElfIt’s A Wonderful Life and The Polar Express.

The world also features a full recreation of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) building and visitors will be able to donate via an in-game QR code to contribute to the charity’s ‘Home for Christmas’ fundraising campaign, which seeks to bring seriously ill children one step closer to home by funding state-of-the-art medical technology, pioneering research programmes into treatments and cures for rare conditions and patient and family support services.

Money raised will also help bring Christmas to the hospital for children from across the UK whose treatment needs to continue over the festive season, as well as funding important services for GOSH staff working to care for patients and their families.  Visitors can also donate directly via this link.

An NVIDIA spokesperson said: “With the power utilised from our RTX GPU, we are thrilled to bring families across the globe a truly unique, virtual Christmas experience. We wanted to bring an accessible and free event for all families this Christmas, whatever their circumstances, while supporting the vital work our friends at Great Ormond Street do. We hope to raise as much as possible to help their efforts this Christmas.”

Families can download the NVIDIA RTX Winter World in Minecraft today at planetminecraft.com.

Minecraft supports Great Ormond Street Hospital with virtual winter wonderland

The world’s largest winter festival has opened its virtual doors to the public to experience Christmas festivities – all in a Minecraft world.

Covering an area with a representative size of over 155,000 square metres or 38 acres, the virtual wonderland is four times the size of the biggest real-world seasonal event in Austria and took specialist artist Ushio Tokura over 300 hours and more than 30 million individual blocks to complete.

Commissioned by NVIDIA, the NVIDIA RTX Winter World will give families across the globe a free festive immersive experience to explore, which exceeds its real-world counterparts in scale, that visitors can enjoy from the comfort of their own homes. It will also offer an opportunity to raise funds for NVIDIA’s charity partner, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity (GOSH Charity).

Utilising NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPU’s (Graphics Processing Unit), real-time ray tracing stunningly simulates the physical behaviour of light, enabling reflections, shadows and other realistic lighting effects, as visitors are transported to a world offering a full winter wonderland and Santa’s grotto experience.

The world includes roller coasters, a Christmas village, frozen ice-skating lake, penguin postal service and petting zoo tent, with playable storylines and quests. Christmas film aficionados should also keep a lookout for Easter Egg homages to famous festive flicks such as ElfIt’s A Wonderful Life and The Polar Express.

The world also features a full recreation of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) building and visitors will be able to donate via an in-game QR code to contribute to the charity’s ‘Home for Christmas’ fundraising campaign, which seeks to bring seriously ill children one step closer to home by funding state-of-the-art medical technology, pioneering research programmes into treatments and cures for rare conditions and patient and family support services.

Money raised will also help bring Christmas to the hospital for children from across the UK whose treatment needs to continue over the festive season, as well as funding important services for GOSH staff working to care for patients and their families.  Visitors can also donate directly via this link.

An NVIDIA spokesperson said: “With the power utilised from our RTX GPU, we are thrilled to bring families across the globe a truly unique, virtual Christmas experience. We wanted to bring an accessible and free event for all families this Christmas, whatever their circumstances, while supporting the vital work our friends at Great Ormond Street do. We hope to raise as much as possible to help their efforts this Christmas.”

Families can download the NVIDIA RTX Winter World in Minecraft today at planetminecraft.com.

Kids’ mental wellness card game Book of Beasties partners with Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity

The children’s mental wellness game developer, Book of Beasties, has partnered with Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity in a bid to raise vital funds to support seriously ill children from across the UK.

Book of Beasties is a multi-award winning children’s mental wellness resource developer and creator of the university accredited mental wellness card game that aims to raise emotional literacy, teach resilience, empathy and encourage open conversations about mental health and wellness.

The new partnership will see the launch of a resource platform on the Book of Beasties’ website that is dedicated to GOSH Charity. New features on the platform will include creative and playful wellbeing resources.

The company will donate £1 per month from each subscriber to its Wellness Champion Platform to support the Hospital’s specialist Play Team, who in turn, support children and young people during their treatment at the hospital. In return, subscribers will receive access to regularly published reading materials, mindfulness and well being activities, webinars, and more.

In early 2019, prior to the pandemic, Book of Beasties visited the psychology team at GOSH, to introduce the Mental Wellness Card Game and donate a number of copies that the hospital’s patients could use.

CEO and co-creator of Book of Beasties, Phil J Tottman, said: “We couldn’t be more honoured and excited to become an official partner of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.

“We were delighted to offer our Book of Beasties game to the Play team at GOSH, we think it is more important now than ever before to promote good mental health amongst children and young people. We hope our dedicated platform will give more people access to our Beasties and their wellness message, whilst donating to support the GOSH Play Team to help them continue their amazing work.”

Chris Carter, head of partnership development at GOSH Charity, added: “We are really pleased to be partnering with Book of Beasties to raise funds for the hospital’s team of play specialists, while simultaneously raising awareness about the mental health and well-being of children.

“We’re excited to work closely with Book of Beasties to develop and grow this partnership.”

Mandy Bryon, joint specialty lead for Psychological and Mental Health Services at Great Ormond Street Hospital, concluded: “I am very impressed with Book of Beasties. This is a really engaging resource for young children that supports them to talk about their feelings in a positive way.”

Smyths Toys launches Funko Pop! Vinyl to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity

The UK toy giant, Smyths Toys, has teamed with Funko to create a special Smyths Toys exclusive Pop! Vinyl figure of the retailer’s own mascot, Oscar in a fundraising effort for the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity in support of seriously ill children across the UK.

The initiative kicked off this week, making the special Oscar Pop! Vinyl available across of of Smyths Toys Superstores in the UK. The figure retails at £9.99.

Last Christmas, Smyths Toys raised £50,000 for GOSH Charity following profits from the sales of their Oscar Plush. The retailer has now committed to donating at least £50,000 to GOSH Charity again this year.

Sinead Byrne, joint head of marketing at Smyths Toys, added: “We are delighted to launch Oscar as a Funko POP! Vinyl to bring our character Oscar to life this year. Smyths Toys is proud to partner again with GOSH Charity to help support seriously ill children from across the UK and continue to be amazed at the work the Charity carries out on a daily basis.”

Liz Tait, director of fundraising at GOSH Charity, said: “Now in the fourth year of our partnership, we are thrilled that Smyths Toys Superstores are supporting GOSH Charity once again with the launch of the Oscar POP! Vinyl. This is a brilliant opportunity for us to raise much-needed funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital, at a time when the hospital needs our support more than ever, so for that we’d like to say a huge thank you.”

Eva Verhaak, head of strategic marketing and sales – Funko EMEA, added: “Smyths Toys Superstores’ initiative to support GOSH Charity is an amazing cause and we are absolutely delighted to be part of it, working with Smyths to create an exclusive collector’s item, a POP! Vinyl figure of the well-known character, Oscar.”