The new Lexus IS is a luxury saloon car, which you can now experience in a completely immersive way before even visiting a showroom. Developed by the team at technology consultancy Amaze (opens in new tab), this interactive video (opens in new tab) allows viewers to fully explore the interior and exterior features of the latest edition to Lexus' hybrid line.
As Lexus' long-term digital partner, Amaze used a combination of live-action footage and CGI to allow viewers to watch and control their viewing experience. Users can do everything from selecting the exterior colour design to understanding more about the controls, precise handling and engineering behind the new car.
Easily accessible
In order for the Amaze team to create a seamless blend between the real and virtual, they filmed the car driving through different landscapes and teamed up with high-end Munich-based 3D visualisations studio RTT (opens in new tab) to scan and take 360 degree imagery of the environment at key points. Built in HTML5 (opens in new tab), the experience works across all devices, and features as the content of an app to promote and sell the new model.
"We have enabled viewers to move easily from a ‘passive’ watching experience to an active ‘immersive’ experience, where they can pause the movie to spin and change the colour of the car within the movie itself," says Wendy Stonefield, chief commercial officer at Amaze. "We used the HTML5 Canvas to achieve this and for the interior spins, where users can change the interior colour of the car whilst seeing it in a parallax format, we fused CSS (opens in new tab) 3D transforms and JavaScript (opens in new tab).
"We wanted to create a movie that was beautiful and remarkably sophisticated - something that would be true to the IS and Lexus brand. Our aim was to explain the car’s attributes and allow an ultra-high-quality experience to bring the emotion of the drive directly to the viewer through full screen, movie footage."
You can view the new interactive Lexus IS movie here (opens in new tab).
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Have you seen any cool interactive projects recently? Let us know in the comments below!
