Ford

During the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) Ford wanted to impress: not only with their new Ford Mustang Shelby GT500, but also with the introduction. For the press preview of their new car a 360 video was shown in VR to 750 people at the same time.

The challenge of this high-end event was the amount of Lenovo Mirage headsets (750) that needed to be installed and synchronized for the press preview of Ford. Next to the press preview, the event was also opened for public for a couple of days. During these public days the synchronization software also had to work to introduce the new car around the hour to hundreds of visitors.

The VR Sync event team was on site two weeks before the event took place. Here they took care of all hardware management. They prepared, charged and numbered all 750 headsets. By numbering the headsets, the event team was able to monitor the status of each unit and swap them if needed.

Next, they loaded Ford’s content in the VR Sync software. For this event VR Sync was integrated into the event’s Watchout system using OSC. This allowed the event organisers to be in full control; they could play, pause and stop the 360 video automatically from the show system.

According to Justin Westbrook, writer for car website Jalopnik, Ford had “one of the more elaborate demos from an otherwise fairly quiet auto show”. The VR Sync software allowed Ford to introduce their car simultaneously to 750 people during the press preview and to a lot of car enthusiasts during the public days. In combination with a car that was lowered from the ceiling and the VR experience, the introduction of Ford created a lot of wow reactions.