John Lewis VR

Following the amazing work the MPC team did on the John Lewis Christmas TV ad, my concept for a VR execution made it onto the Oxford Street flagship store, where it stayed until the end of the Christmas holidays.

The experience immersed people fully in the TV ad garden, where they were surrounded by the very furry animals.

I wanted to reduce the learning curve as much as possible, so instead of introducing controllers, we tracked people's hands and their gestures so that interaction was as natural as possible.

I also wanted to create a 2nd screen experience to improve the traditional user's "point-of-view camera" that spectators are normally resigned to, so we created a way of compositing users' performances into the 3D garden scene in real-time, and display that on a screen facing the visitor's queue.

That same composition was turned into a shareable video, and as soon as people took off the headset, they were handed a printed paper ticket with a unique URL to view their video online.