The Campaign

There was an opportunity to use technology to solve the problem of space, and improve the overall dealership experience, positioning GM as an Innovation leader in the automotive space. V-Showroom is a first-of-its-kind large-scale Mixed-Reality Dealership for General Motors. It provides an augmented dealership experience for buyers, enabling them to virtually experience a car showroom anytime and anywhere. We conceptualized and built V-Showroom from scratch, utilizing emerging spatial computing technology from Silicon Valley. It merges real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations in real-time, by using an overlay of augmented content that interacts with the physical space or reality it is in. Any physical space can be scanned to place an exact 3D replica of the car, e.g. on a coffee table, or scaled to a full-sized version. Customers can be shown how the car’s inbuilt features and technologies work, creating a fully-immersive showroom experience.

Creative Execution

Using a tablet device (iPad Pro) that is attached with a structural depth sensor, the car and environment is scanned to capture dense geometry in real time, simulate real world physics and create a persistent anchor for rich augmented content to the physical world. Although concepted to bring a virtual Cruze to where no Cruzes exist, the V-Showroom is also designed to work with physical cars on display. The same spatial technology can accurately map rich feature demos over the structure of the physical car, allowing buyers to view augmented technology demos while walking around the showroom car. In order to deploy the V-Showroom to 110 dealerships, we also created dealership confidence content and a layered service level agreement to ensure that all dealers could easily set up their own V-Showroom, troubleshoot and escalate any issues.

This has been rolled out in 110 Korean dealerships so far, and plans are in place for further expansions with four new models in Australia, Korea, the Middle East and USA. Ultimately, V-Showroom has been created with scalability in mind; it is available in multiple languages and can be localised for future implementation across more markets. As Mixed Reality technology looks set to become more wide scale and accessible, customers could be looking at a future where they could potentially download the showroom into their own homes as well as fully customise their vehicle, from colour and technical specifications to trims and interiors. As the V-Showroom was only launched in May 2017, there are no hard results to be shared yet.

Brands find themselves moving into a world of reduced physical retail footprint. They needed a better solution to meet this new reality around their physical channels with limited spaces, all while retaining a good retail and product experience. Existing sales tools like brochures, webpages or interactive kiosks do not meet that exact requirement. Additionally, brands who’ve built a highly-mobile salesforce have had to either struggle with underwhelming product presentations or struggle with bulky sales kits. Our V-Showroom solution with its use of cutting-edge spatial computing techniques and Mixed-Reality content finds a beautiful fit in this new retail reality.