Our idea is to breathe meaning into Acura’s tagline, “Precision Crafted Performance,” to show the world what it really feels like. We want to use our presence at Sundance and beyond to curate performances that bring the emotional benefits of Acura technology to life.

We’ll focus on the intuitive control that Acura’s driver-centric technologies deliver by creating performances that are personalized and even controlled by our guests. Their presence, their movements, and even their states of mind will affect their experiences.

Each guest will step into the Mood Roads experience the same way, but each will be coming into it with a different state of mind. One person just got off the slopes and is cold and excited. One person is going through some personal issues and arrives anxious and hesitant. This will all factor into their personal journey down Mood Roads.

Guests experience Mood Roads in a large, spherical motion simulator. The motion simulator is equipped with the driver’s seat of an Acura NSX. One guest at a time enters the motion simulator, straps in, and is fitted with various biometric sensors that allow us to track their mood as they go through the experience.

The experience starts, and the guest embarks on a journey customized on the fly with imagery, color, speed, and landscape shifting and transforming according to their mood. Both audio and visuals change and personalize according to the guest’s biometric data to ensure no two experiences are the same. The journey is visualized as a large projection on the inside of the sphere and accompanied by music and sound effects played through a speaker system.

Mood Roads takes the guest down an actual road in a fantasy environment. The curves, twists, and turns of the road are translated into motion by the motion simulator. The experience lasts about 90 seconds and takes the guest through four different levels, each with a distinct style, but all of them customized and made personal by the guest’s mood.

Each Mood Roads ride took about 3.5 minutes, and the average wait time to try the ride was about 30 minutes over the entire festival. We had 1,081 unique riders go through the experience during the festival, which, given the length of each ride, put us very close to maximum capacity. We generated 1,690 Twitter posts, which is more than 1.5 posts per unique rider. The Twitter posts generated 2.5M impressions.

Our guests left feeling excited and awed by both the visuals and the technology, and everyone expressed being happy with the ride, even with the long wait times, and were quoted saying it was “worth the wait.”

After Sundance, several entertainment and technology conferences contacted Acura to feature Mood Roads at their events. It is currently touring the U.S. and was recently featured at the 2017 Silicon Valley Comic Con.

With Mood Roads, we created an interaction model unlike any driving experience before it. Driving simulators typically have steering wheels, paddle shifters, and foot pedals, all things familiar to users from real cars. We stripped away those things, instead outfitting the user with 30 sensors measuring 24 different biometric data points, all of them creating a direct connection between the mind and mood of the user and the output they see, hear, and feel. The colors, the time of day, the movement, and the music were all controlled by the emotional, cognitive, and physical input of the user.

Acura is a presenting sponsor at the Sundance Film Festival, which champions those who develop alternative and innovative approaches to storytelling. It also provides a unique opportunity to engage Acura’s most premium luxury audience, making it the most coveted experiential event for our client.

Acura’s performance technologies create a direct connection between car and driver, providing smooth power transitions and supreme control. The result is a thrilling and emotional driving experience. This notion of control and resulting emotion were the core inspiration for Mood Roads. As we move toward a future where driverless cars challenge the status quo, are we forgoing control and embracing apathy?