Volkswagen was seeking something different for the launch of the new Passat 2015 and decided on a digital route, with the key messages being: innovation, premium and cool.

How did the concept come about?

It was during our test drives of the Passat that we discovered the array of amazing, invisible technologies embedded in the car.

Our challenge was to find a way to tell a story about features you cannot see – the invisible innovations. We had to create an idea that enabled us to view the car in a different way and allow us to talk to people about invisible stuff, and in doing so encase it in the warm, human story that customers have come to expect from Volkswagen.

Humour me for a moment and imagine you have a pair of magic goggles. When you put them on and look at the Passat you’ll be able to see its invisible technology visibly working. Back in the real world, this thinking led us to explore a projected environment that reveals the invisible technology as a beautiful, intelligent tool, dancing around the Passat showing what the car is seeing, testing, calculating and delivering. From this perspective we then ‘hard cut’ out of a virtual world into a real life story, showing the human benefit of such features.

Tribal Worldwide London developed the initial concept, but we needed to partner with Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) early on to unpack the idea. Barney Steel, director at MLF, along with his team of developers and wizards, helped refine our initial idea to create a world first in virtual reality – live 3D tracking projections.

How did you make the invisible visible?

On paper we knew what the car was doing. It was scanning using sonar, it was scanning using cameras and it was scanning using sonic technologies. It could see 120m in front and could park itself with 40cm to spare. Armed with this knowledge we started to create an artistic representation of the technology in the form of green waves that transmit from the car and respond to the 3D environment it is travelling through. So if a line hit a curb or object it would bend and move around the object. To create the 3D world we took lidar scans of real locations, and from that lidar data we filmed and then built in our virtual environments. The lidar scans naturally created a beautiful art direction of delicate detail. It completely sold the refined technology story we were trying to tell.

Voilà! We had an innovative, premium and cool technique from which we could tell stories about the Volkswagen technology in a virtual world.

What were the challenges?

The most exciting and challenging part of this project was that there’s no CGI or special effects – everything was shot live on shoot. The tech and projectors were set up with tracking cameras to follow the car, creating cutting edge content in virtual reality. Like moving ourselves through a virtual game, we moved our camera around our car, filming the intriguing and intelligent stories. Coordinating the tracking system, the film crew, the car and the projections was a finely balanced act. There was potential for a lot to go wrong. But MLF called for precision and we were watertight, ensuring no mistakes were made. It was the challenges we overcame that built the excitement around this campaign, and our relentless practice and testing before the shoot days paid off.

How did technology allow a creative idea to become reality?

We are a creative digital agency that has a very strong creative tech heritage and creative tech team. We know we have to bring many experts together to find and use dynamic tech to identify a creative solution. Our experienced team knew MLF and were familiar with their work and spotted the potential to create something amazing with such great partners. The tech unpacked and nurtured the creative ideas into exciting stories. The idea grew with the tech on this journey and every new step changed a part of the story and part of the idea. Tech and creative have to work so closely together to blend and break new landscapes and create great pieces of work.

This idea is still not finished as it has the possibility to be a live event, go onto other devices, or to go into public spaces and shops. This tech and creative journey really is never-ending. As new technology is developed and prices come down we are creating ground-breaking work for what started as a car launch campaign.

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