“A cool example of integrating digital with the real world.”—Sean Klassen
“I love the way you can fuse handmade 3-D chalk art with AR. Both design platforms work with illusion to transport users into another world, but one just happens to be analog and the other digital.”—Ana Serrano
Overview: Augmented reality merged with street art in this spectacular digital OOH campaign for Cadillac by ad agency Fallon. Building upon the Cadillac ATS VS The World campaign, in which the new car journeyed abroad to conquer the world’s most brutal roads, Fallon brought the experience back home to the states—and gave it a whole new dimension. In Miami, San Francisco, New York and Chicago, millions of people reenacted the car’s epic adventure by navigating their own virtual ATS through three-dimensional, chalk-drawn sidewalk landscapes.
• Using the hand-drawn artwork as the setting for the virtual ATS driving scene, AR technology specialists Daqri worked on-site, adjusting their image sensors to recognize important details of the murals as they came together.
• Once the murals were complete, animation of the virtual ATS was perfected to follow the newly-drawn roads. Simultaneously, the mobile app for iOS and Android was trained to use the completed murals to trigger the animated AR experience for participants.
• Two million people experienced this groundbreaking fusion of art and technology, making this one of the most successful social experiences in Cadillac’s history.
Comments by Fallon:
Is the audience you were targeting difficult to reach? “Typically, automotive companies are limited when it comes to getting consumers to actually experience the car. Our solution gave consumers who don’t usually seek out a dealership or car show a feel for the Cadillac ATS outside of the standard retail space. Brand ambassadors armed with iPads demonstrated the ATS speeding down the chalk-drawn roads through AR, and afterward, viewers were encouraged to pose for a photo, explore campaign videos within the app and download the branded app on their own devices using our complimentary Wi-Fi hotspot. Armed with the app and a special AR-enabled postcard, people were able to take the ATS 3D experience home to share with family and friends.”
What was the thinking behind the navigational structure? “We worked hard to keep our navigation simple. We experimented with different navigation models, iterated quite a bit and avoided the urge to add unnecessary settings. In the end, we came up with a navigation structure that offers only a few options and is mostly linear.”
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “Using just-completed, hand-drawn, large-scale chalk art to trigger a synchronized augmented reality animation was uncharted territory. It required countless rounds of trial and error under extreme time constraints at each event to get it right. Ultimately, all involved coordinated efforts to pull this off despite the unpredictability of threatening weather and other variables.”
How did time constraints affect the final outcome? “Final training of the ATS 3D app to recognize the chalk mural target image and synchronize the animation could only happen upon the completion of each mural, which usually occurred just hours before the opening of each event. These constraints required weeks of advance preparation to ensure that our augmented reality content could be fine-tuned, and the animation perfected, in the limited time we were given.”
