Painting Your Way Out of a VR Happy Meal – SXSW McDonald’s Experience

SXSW is the one week where brands, marketers, and creatives from around the world descend upon Austin, Texas, for an annual extravaganza of brand marketing. The part music festival, part film festival, and part technology conference, SXSW is the place for brands to flex their innovative marketing muscle with experiences all vying to captivate attendees.

Of course, we couldn’t be happier that virtual reality is the hot ticket at SXSW this year. There’s even a VR/AR track of panels at SXSW and a ton of events to keep you busy throughout the week.

So it’s no surprise that with virtual reality being the next wave of interactive media and innovation, McDonald’s is taking advantage of the trend by creating their very own VR experience that mashes art, technology, and a Happy Meal.

The McDonald’s Loft is a pop-up experience located across the street from the Convention Center and is an experience built for the HTC Vive. The VR experience itself reminds us of Google’s Tilt Brush that lets you paint in a virtual reality space. The McDonald’s V-Artist experience gives similar tools like a paintbrush but adds other creative tools like a paintball shooter and laser-guided color etcher!

You also have a palette to select a wide range of colors, letting you really go nuts in a 3D world surrounded by branded Happy Meal boxes to paint on as your blank canvas.

McDonald’s worked in collaboration with Groove Jones to create the VR experience, also integrating a platform that allows participants to take photos of what they are doing in VR and go over to a kiosk to share photos of themselves on social channels.

The kiosks also allow guests to print out their VR artwork and take a McDonald’s branded copy with them home, bringing everything full-circle from virtual reality to printed Happy Meal art.

In February we uncovered McDonald’s experimenting with restaurants across Sweden to distribute Happy Meal boxes that could be turned into a VR viewer, much like Google Cardboard.