Championed by its Vorsprunch dürch Technik slogan, Audi is known as one of the car industry’s most innovative brands. In Norway, however, Audi’s leading position was challenged by brands such as BMW, Mercedes and Volvo.

To show that Audi’s technological edge is not just in their cars but in the brand’s DNA, Audi wanted its new campaign to reflect their commitment to technology. For the introduction of the Audi Q5, the brief was to give Audi dealers something truly cool and innovative that would spark people’s excitement for Audi in a way that would reach far beyond the dealership through social and PR.

Audi: Enter Sandbox is a VR installation that lets people step into a 400-kilo sandbox to create their own test-drive environment. By moving the sand around, people can form lanes, jump and even mud pools. The physical sandbox is then turned into a virtual playground using a depth-sensing camera that renders the sandbox into a 3D environment you can explore with the Q5 in a VR driving simulator. The driving simulator combines an Oculus Rift headset with a physical recreation of the Audi Q5, complete with feedback from the steering wheel and the actual sounds of the Audi Q5.

Enter Sandbox was designed as a traveling in-store installation with a transportable 400-kilo sandbox from which participants can create their own test-drive environment.

The physical sandbox is scanned in 3D based on 200,000 measure points, using a Kinect camera and a HTC Vive Lighthouse tracking system.

To capture the sandbox at such detail, the sandbox is bombarded with bursts of infrared light that are captured by the Kinect camera to measure the height differences relative to the camera. This height-depth-scan is then rendered into a 3D model of the sandbox, which users can explore in VR in an Audi Q5.

To include the tools and toys participants could move around the sandbox, we created 3D replicas that would replace the real-life toys inside the VR experience. Finally, when participants uncovered the floor of the sandbox, this empty space was replaced by a pool of water in the VR experience.