This VR tennis experience is taking over Waterloo Station.
Jaguar has created a Wimbledon VR experience with their newest UK ambassador, Andy Murray. As part of the brand’s #FeelWimbledon campaign, Jaguar is bringing fans closer to the emotions of the The Championships with their latest Waterloo Station installation and distribution of Cardboard headsets at showrooms and Wimbledon grounds.
The Jaguar VR experience takes you on an emotive journey across a meticulously recreated All-England Club, down onto Centre Court, and inside the mind of the champion. Narrated by Murray himself, #FeelWimbledon was created by UK virtual reality studio, Hammerhead VR. The experience was developed in Unreal Engine, using 4D character scanning and a specialist array of 125 Digital SLR cameras to capture the hero tennis player and 24 other hero characters, and motion capture technology for animation.
Commissioned by global agency Mindshare for Jaguar Land Rover, a team of 20 spent an estimated 9,000 man hours developing the experience that features hyper-real hero characters, and the All-England Club populated with over 14,000 characters.
The virtual reality experience debuted at UK Goodwood Festival of Speed and is now placed for two weeks at London Waterloo railway station as part of a Jaguar #FeelWimbledon experiential zone, running for the duration of the Wimbledon Championships 2016. The experiential is powered by Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 graphics cards and Oculus Rift headsets. Both activations were developed by CAA Sports Consulting who also manage PR for the Jaguar, Wimbledon and Andy Murray partnership.
As part of the wider campaign, Hammerhead also created the experience as a 360 video for YouTube and Google Cardboard, as well as 2D video formats, and renders for the Transvision and motion screens at Waterloo. 40,000 Google Cardboards will be distributed to Jaguar retailers, commuters and tennis fans throughout the campaign.
Waterloo Station seems to be the hot spot for VR activations at Wimbledon. Last year, Stella Artois gave fans a chance to fly like Wimbledon’s resident bird of prey, Rufus, over the tennis courts in a multi-sensory experience that included a Rift and hydraulic simulator with fans blowing in your face.
Jaguar Land Rover launched their first VR experience (in partnership with IBM) back in September 2014. The VR experience allowed in-store consumers wearing a VR headset to choose the model, make, color and features of a car. The experience also allowed you to get into the car to check out interior features with a 360-degree view, and to make real-time changes.
Google Cardboard users can access Jaguar’s Andy Murray Virtual Reality experience by visiting feelwimbledon.com.
