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. All these components are collected as individual and dynamic data points through biometric sensors and translated into visuals, sound, music, and movement by Mood Roads.

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.

At a practical level, to deliver on this we, used an EEG headset that tracked and measured the users’ brainwaves. We combined this with a real-time heart-rate monitor embedded in handlebars that users held on to for a total of 30 unique data points. At the same time, we leveraged six key performance metrics to create six distinct user profiles, each with a distinct, dominant mood. The user’s dominant mood was translated into variations in the experience’s visuals, such as changing the time of day, switching out the color palette, creating hills, turns, and twists in the road and, of course, altering the vehicle’s speed. At the same time, a dynamic audio score was mixed and remixed in real time through the same dominant mood and the 30 data points.

As all the visual, movement, and audio outputs changed in real time, so did the user’s experience, thus creating a feedback loop where the user’s biometric data both altered the experience and was affected by it, ending in a crescendo of data coinciding with a literal crescendo in the music and a hill on the road inclining into the clouds and beyond.

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.”

Each journey was approximately three miles, meaning that more than 3,000 virtual miles were driven by our users, and no two journeys were ever the same, just like no two people are the same. The users’ dominant mood was stressed, with approximately 30 percent tracking that mood, which is not surprising considering the data’s feedback loop and the overwhelming sensory experience of Mood Roads.

With Mood Roads, we had to let go of the control we usually have over every creative aspect of the the final output, instead letting the biometric data of the user create the visuals, music, and movement of their journey.

We guided and directed the creative and technology, but at the end of the day, the user’s biometric data told the story of Mood Roads.

Driving a modern supercar like the Acura NSX is essentially collecting data input from the user through the car’s user interface, as well as data from the car’s many sensors, and translating that data into actions performed by the car as quickly as possible for the optimal driving experience. But the user doesn’t know all this, nor do they need to know it. All they need to know is that driving the NSX gives you an even better sense of control than when driving a car with old-fashioned mechanical steering and controls.

To tell the story of ultimate control through data, we wanted to create an experience that skipped over the car’s user interface, instead wiring the data from the mind and biometrics of the user straight into the experience. While this resulted in an almost overwhelming experience for the user, it also served to illustrate the complexities taking place behind the scenes of the NSX, all resulting in ultimate driver control and a response even faster than the driver’s intuition.

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 mantra is Precision Crafted Performance, and its technology and innovations are created to be in complete service of the driver. This year at Sundance, Acura asked us to bring that ideology to life. Inspired by Acura’s performance technology, how can we build an intuitive control experience, one that further closes the gap between man and machine and that is true to Acura’s independent and innovative spirit?

Our goals were to:

Create a buzzworthy activation that goes beyond Sundance

Create an experience that improves Acura’s perception as innovative, performance-driven, and prestigious

Create an experience that improves Acura’s relevance