Lockheed Martin - Field Trip To Mars

2016 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity - Most Awarded Campaign

19 Cannes Lions

Field Trip to Mars was the first-ever group VR experience…taking the literal shape of a yellow school bus and transforming it into an immersive virtual experience in order to transport students to the surface of the Red Planet.

The backstory: Lockheed Martin was a major sponsor of the 2016 Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC. We used the convention as the impetus to launch a wider initiative, Generation Beyond, to inspire and engage the scientists and technologists of tomorrow. We drove a school bus full of kids to the convention hall to hear Lockheed Martin’s CEO, Marillyn Hewson, deliver her opening remarks. The bus was rebuilt with transparent 4K monitors so the kids could peer out the windows on the sites of DC, and at some point along the way we flicked the switch on the transparent monitors revealing the photo real CGI environment of Mars. When the bus hit a bump on the street in the real world, it felt like the bus went over a bump on Mars. When the bus turned in the real world the kids felt the bus turning on Mars.

In order to pull this off we partnered with Framestore, the Academy Award winning visual effects company behind Gravity and The Martian. Framestore created a 200-square-mile ‘worldspace’ based on the real street configurations of D.C. Then the team programmatically covered the area with geological features and painted objects along the bus’s route, and created a system that would allow the real bus speed, GPS and accelerometer to be translated into Unreal Game Engine, creating a real school bus that would exist inside the realm of a video game. In essence, the bus itself became the headset: transparent 4K screens enabled the student passengers to look outside to D.C., and when we were ready to, we switched the monitors to transport them to the rocky terrain of Mars.

After a weekend on the convention floor, the bus was sent on a 6 month journey visiting schools around the Country. Its final destination was Super Bowl LI in Houston. Then in October, 2018, Lockheed Martin donated its Mars Experience Bus to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.