New Lands is a fully immersive virtual reality world. Once inside, viewers find themselves standing on the edge of a cliff in a natural and lush environment with beautiful sweeping vistas overlooking a vast mountain range. Viewers are surrounded by geological features that look familiar at first; upon close inspection, it becomes clear that this isn't planet Earth but some other world. New Lands was created by combining beautiful, pre-rendered, high-resolution graphics and in-engine elements to maximize visual impact and presence and showcase the power of VR as a truly immersive and entertaining medium.

The primary objective in the execution was to reach a previously unseen level of visual beauty, immersive qualities, and interactivity in a mobile VR experience. In VR, this means painstakingly considering every part of the world.

We have a high-fidelity world in VR that borrows its look, feel, and interactivity from the gaming world. With this approach, graphics are often rendered in real time (while the experience is running). Given the processing power of a mobile phone, you end up with low visual fidelity and constrained experiences. Inevitably, these experiences end up being low-poly 3-D worlds, reminiscent of video game consoles of years past. The game-engine-like implementation of this enabled us to regain depth with stereo graphics, lights, and shadows rendered in real time, therefore creating a feeling of presence, which is VR’s secret sauce.

This experience was then packaged as a piece of software and distributed to thousands of retail locations.

Our VR experience is due to be deployed to approximately 1,500 Best Buy retail locations and Samsung retail locations by the time you are seeing this case study.