Turning an ordinary school bus trip into an incredible journey to space
Designing immersive technology for the world’s leader in space
Client
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is leading the space revolution, but they want the world to know. We helped Lockheed Martin to target a generation that will be the first to colonize Mars tomorrow. The first people to live on Mars are sitting in school today. To inspire and engage the scientists and technologists of tomorrow, we collaborated with a talented team to create the world’s first Group VR experience to transport these students to the surface of Mars.
Platforms
Group Virtual Reality
Web (responsive)
Roles
Experience Design
Interaction Design
Art Direction
Development
Deliverables
Product Innovation
Interactive Web Experience
The Challenge
Lockheed Martin was the lead contractor on the Orion, the first spacecraft designed to take humans to Mars. But, Lockheed Martin was being overshadowed by pop culture. We needed to show that Lockheed Martin doesn’t just talk about space: They build spaceships. We wanted to get more kids to care about going into space because today’s kids will be tomorrow’s Martian explorers. So we decided: Let’s send them to Mars on a school bus. We created a VR experience, “The Field Trip To Mars,” that turns a ride on an ordinary yellow school bus into a virtual reality tour of 200 miles of the Martian surface. Lockheed Martin’s message was clear: Nobody can take us further.
BEHIND THE SCENES
The digital experience
We later worked with Lockheed Martin to launch a broader initiative, Generation Beyond, to continue inspiring and engaging the scientists and technologists of tomorrow. The team created a Unity web experience to explore intricate models of the Orion capsule and Mars itself.
The results
19 Cannes Lions
365,000 in-person impressions at the conference
2,500+ bus riders
2,210,209 online media impressions, and counting
Notable attention
Steve Frick (CAPTAIN, USN, RET.) NASA Astronaut
“It’s going to be just a great outreach tool,” Frick said, “having something mobile like that, that’s able to go out to where kids are and give them the experience first-hand of what it might be like to be on Mars. Hopefully it’ll get them wanting to learn more and look for other materials which we’re also hoping to provide [by] getting our online curriculum out into the schools.”
Michael Yapp (founder and director of Google Zoo) at C2
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