Just like the car is relentlessly centered on instantly fulfilling the driver’s every intention, so is “Total Control,” an interactive video experience created not for the passive broadcast TV consumption of generations past but for active play on the device at the center of the Millennial universe: their phone.

The experience launches them into exhilarating performance footage of the Acura ILX. The footage is perfectly shot and edited for the vertical orientation of their phones and may at first look like a regular static car commercial. But then an on-screen prompt encourages them to rotate their phones. As they do, the ILX power-drifts right across the screen, reacting instantly to the physical interaction.

Through a series of physical interactions, users explore every angle of the car as it slides, spins, slaloms, and even jumps across their screens in both vertical and horizontal aspect ratios.

Acura has a proud tradition of making performance vehicles, always relentlessly centered on the driver experience. The Acura ILX might not have the biggest engine in its class, but it has something much better: the best power-to-weight ratio, which means the car always reacts instantly to whatever you tell it to do—is always incredibly quick to react.

In the same way, “Total Control” is an interactive video experience that instantly and without lag shows performance maneuvers that correspond to whatever physical interaction the user makes with their phone. To make this possible, we designed a system that seamlessly connects vertical and landscape video modes using a massive video grid containing every performance maneuver available to the user. We then constructed an algorithm that would detect the phone’s movement and instantly show the correct cell in the grid with no lag.

The exhilarating performance footage was captured in just one day of shooting on a closed course using a combination of pursuit vehicles, including one that allowed us to get within inches of the picture car at speeds of up to 50 mph. We completed more than 50 setups in one shoot day to have enough variation in footage to make every interactive test drive unique.

The project was live from January 13 to March 10, 2019. The experience was made possible by using Facebook Instant Games, a new interactive platform accessed through Instagram or the Facebook or FB Messenger app on the user’s smartphone device. With this project, Acura became the first automotive brand to use the platform.