Covestro is Using VR to Transport its Customers into the Year 2030 and Experience the Future of Ridesharing and Autonomous Vehicles

The automotive market is going through rapid and fundamental changes with autonomous driving, ride and car-sharing, and vehicle electrification. Covestro is a leading producer of advanced polymers and high-performance plastics in North America and around the world. The company has been looking into the future of mobility to guide its development projects and ensure its automotive materials can meet the needs of tomorrow.

Watch the Teaser Video

Below is the taser video used prior to the launch event.

Watch the Full 360º Experience

Below is a link to the entire 360º experience that can be viewed on a web browser. The original onsite experience is being viewed on Oculus Go headsets and can be seen stereoscopically.

About the Production

Groove Jones worked with the Covestro Future of Mobility (FoM) team to launch a new VR (Virtual Reality) experience that allows you to step into that future.

The Covestro team predicts that autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and vehicles built for ridesharing purposes will shift the focus from the driving experience to the riding experience, which will require more high-value material solutions for vehicle interiors. Groove Jones worked with the team to illustrate that story through a dynamic and interactive VR experience. Below is an overview of the production.

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The Covestro team predicts that autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, and vehicles built for ridesharing purposes will shift the focus from the driving experience to the riding experience. Groove Jones worked with the team to illustrate that story into a dynamic and interactive VR experience. Below is an overview of the production.

Overview

The Groove Jones team met with the Covestro Future of Mobility team to better understand the research and insights that the team had discovered. The future will be different than it is today. It portrays a world where the majority of the population doesn’t own a vehicle. Where owning a personal vehicle will change and be replaced by on-demand mobility services, enabling fleet owners to add more high-value features on the interior because the cost of the vehicle is distributed over many riders. We needed to envision what life will be like.

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The production began by outlining the key beats around the story that we needed to tell. The team then delivered a series of storyboards to help visualize and time the story. We discussed key areas of what materials would be used both inside and outside of the vehicle.

Storyboarding the Experience

Once the storyboards and script were complete, we began to develop the visual style for the production. Key elements were the city, vehicles, props, and characters that we would see in the year 2030.

Ridesharing and Autonomous Vehicles

The VR experience explores the story of a traveler as he/she leaves work to head home and then eventually heads out on a family trip over the weekend. So the main vehicle that we focused on is a rideshare vehicle where we take the user on their daily commute to work.

Below is a shot as the vehicle pulls up to your home in order to take you to work.

The second part of the experience showcases the type of vehicle for the shots with the family on a weekend getaway.

Below is a shot of the interior of the vehicle that the family takes on the weekend.

We needed to design the city and environments seen from when the user leaves their office and travels through the city and eventually into the countryside. Most of these scenes can be viewed through the oversized windows of the vehicle.

The City

Below is a final shot as the user leaves their office and orders the rideshare vehicle.

In and around the city.

People

Various people are seen on and along the ride. We needed to create a wide variety of people that you might encounter while sharing a vehicle. The team also needed to create the clothes that they wore.

Each character was animated using various techniques, including our GrooveTech™Character Performance Capture platform. This enabled the team to capture our actors on-site at our offices and work through each scene in real-time.

Watch the Behind the Scenes Video

Launch Event

Covestro launched the VR experience on December 3, 2018, at its RoadTrip 2030 event, which was held at the Energy Innovation Center in Pittsburgh, PA. The event brought together innovative players that are leading the charge toward a driverless future – from automakers, suppliers, and ridesharing companies to research, engineering, and design institutes – to ignite, discuss and experience the future of mobility.

About Covestro’s Future of Mobility Initiative

The Future of Mobility (FoM) initiative is a North America (NA) cross-business unit enterprise launched by the Covestro leadership team to capture, synthesize, and act upon long-range industry trends at a company-wide level to guide their position on future mobility.

For more information please visit https://www.covestro.us/en/futureofmobility

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