It was a little while ago that VRFocus reported that Mountain Dew had launched a virtual reality (VR) 360 degree video cmpaign to see which name for their new drink should be chosen using racing in VR to determine what the audience wanted, which ended up at Pitch Black. Unreal Engine has now released a blog post talking about their involvement in Mountain Dew’s VR ventures, including this advert.
With marketing experiences like these it is easy to think that they come easy and out of thin air, but it seems as though a lot of effort has been put into Mountain Dew’s DEWcision 2016 campaign. The whole development took three months, and they hoped for something as engaging as Facebook 360. But, they feel like they couldn’t have done it without the use of Unreal Engine as Mountain Dew turned to them to bring its first VR experience to fans, developed for the Oculus Rift.
“For our fourth VR installment for Mountain Dew, we wanted to create an experience that offered full immersion and interactivity so that the user would be able to provide active input,” said Bruno Ferrari, co-director and senior motion graphic artist. “In this case, that means driving the car and choosing each flavor track while receiving haptic feedback. The user gets both the physical vibrations from the steering wheel and also has their track choice counted toward the larger voting ecosystem of the 360 campaign.”
When it came to the use of Unreal Engine, Ferrari couldn’t deny it was the only platform to use. “Unreal continues to be one of the leading and most mature game engines out there,” Ferrari said. “It’s also free to use. It has the largest community base, so there’s more support and tools being created around the platform every day. Although we’re still interested in creating pre-rendered videos, the added interactivity made possible with Unreal is truly transformative to the current and future of VR.”
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