Covestro is Using VR to Transport its Customers into the Year 2030 and Experience the Future of Ridesharing and Autonomous Vehicles
The automotive market is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes with autonomous driving, ride and car-sharing, and vehicle electrification. Covestro is a leading producer of advanced polymers and high-performance plastics in North America and worldwide. The company has been looking into the future of mobility to guide its development projects and ensure its automotive materials can meet the needs of tomorrow.
Watch the Teaser Video
Below is the teaser video used before the launch event.
Watch the Full 360º Experience.
Below is a link to the 360º experience that can be viewed on a web browser. The original onsite experience is being viewed on Oculus Go headsets and can be seen stereoscopically.
About the Production
Groove Jones worked with the Covestro Future of Mobility (FoM) team to launch a new VR (Virtual Reality) experience allowing you to enter that future.
The Covestro team predicts that autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and vehicles built for ridesharing purposes will shift the focus from the driving experience to the riding experience, requiring more high-value material solutions for vehicle interiors. Groove Jones worked with the team to illustrate that story through a dynamic and interactive VR experience. Below is an overview of the production.
The Covestro team predicts that autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and vehicles built for ridesharing purposes will shift the focus from the driving experience to the riding experience. Groove Jones worked with the team to illustrate that story into a dynamic and interactive VR experience. Below is an overview of the production.
Overview
The Groove Jones team met with the Covestro Future of Mobility team to better understand the research and insights that the group had discovered. The future will be different than it is today. It portrays a world where most of the population doesn’t own a vehicle. Owning a personal car will change and be replaced by on-demand mobility services, enabling fleet owners to add more high-value features to the interior because the cost of the vehicle is distributed over many riders. We needed to envision what life would be like.
The production began by outlining the key beats around the story that we needed to tell. The team then delivered a series of storyboards to help visualize and time the story. We discussed key areas of what materials would be used both inside and outside of the vehicle.
Storyboarding the Experience
Once the storyboards and script were complete, we began to develop the visual style for the production. Key elements were the city, vehicles, props, and characters that we would see in the year 2030.
Ridesharing and Autonomous Vehicles
The VR experience explores the story of a traveler as he/she leaves work to head home and then eventually heads out on a family trip over the weekend. So the main vehicle that we focused on is a rideshare vehicle where we take the user on their daily commute to work.
Below is a shot as the vehicle pulls up to your home in order to take you to work.
The second part of the experience showcases the type of vehicle for the shots with the family on a weekend getaway.
Below is a shot of the vehicle interior the family takes on the weekend.
We needed to design the city and environments seen when the user leaves their office and travels through the city and eventually into the countryside. Most of these scenes can be viewed through the vehicle’s oversized windows.
The City
Below is a final shot of the user leaving their office and ordering the rideshare vehicle.
In and around the city.
People
Various people are seen on and along the ride. We needed to create a wide variety of people that you might encounter while sharing a vehicle. The team also needed to create the clothes that they wore.
Each character was animated using various techniques, including our GrooveTech™Character Performance Capture platform. This enabled the team to capture our actors on-site at our offices and work through each scene in real time.
Watch the Behind the Scenes Video
Launch Event
Covestro launched the VR experience on December 3, 2018, at its RoadTrip 2030 event, which was held at the Energy Innovation Center in Pittsburgh, PA. The event brought together innovative players that are leading the charge toward a driverless future – from automakers, suppliers, and ridesharing companies to research, engineering, and design institutes – to ignite, discuss and experience the future of mobility.
About Covestro’s Future of Mobility Initiative
The Future of Mobility (FoM) initiative is a North America (NA) cross-business unit enterprise launched by the Covestro leadership team to capture, synthesize, and act upon long-range industry trends at a company-wide level to guide their position on future mobility.
For more information, please visit https://www.covestro.us/en/futureofmobility
