MPC Creative partners with Cheil Worldwide and Unit 9 to create Samsung’s thrill-a-second 4D Snowboarding VR showpiece for the Winter Olympics

Ahead of this year’s Winter Olympics, Samsung challenged MPC Creative to create two immersive experiences to launch at the Games this February 2018. Two unique, extreme sports-infused 4D rides were born: Our LA team's Winter Ride and our London studio’s Snowboarding VR showpiece, which previewed at CES in Las Vegas. Both rides are designed to be experienced in person, as part of a custom installation, taking users on a breathtaking journey that captures Samsung’s ‘beyond your imagination’ brand spirit.     

The Snowboard VR takes users through a hyper-real journey complete with vast canyons, sheer rock cliff, and a gravity defying ‘world in the sky'. Before donning the VR headsets, users stand on a physical snowboard which replicates the movements of the snowboard in the VR scene, providing a deeper sense of immersion. Creative Director Andre Assalino says, "To create the epic environments, MPC Creative leveraged the amazing 3D resources at MPC, working in ZBrush, Maya and Houdini. Within Unreal Engine we were then able to light the environments beautifully and add physics-based animations. The result is a ride that is as fast-paced and unexpected as the real thing.” 

MPC Creative used topographical data from a volcanic mountain range in Chile and integrated live action footage to build the Snowboarding experience.Thanks to our proprietary 360˚ export plugin for Unreal, once the final tweaks had been made, the London team were able to render 360˚ videos over the course of a few hours, ready to be played on Samsung’s Gear VR headsets.

Andre adds: “Rendering the same content through our traditional CG pipeline would have taken several days and removed the flexibility of making iterative improvements until the end of the project”.

The result is a hair-raising 4D snowboarding experience, which will bring Winter Olympics fans closer to the thrills of high-speed boarding at its most extreme.

A massive congratulations to the team for winning an FWA Award in April for this astounding project.