Hive VR Experience: It’s a challenge many technology companies face – how do you communicate the benefits of a product that on a technical-level alienates most of their potential customers. Home automation, smart connected home, IoT are buzzwords that most people have come across but the less technically-savvy individual assumes is not for them! This is the challenge that faces Hive daily, they have an innovative and growing range of home automation products – from motion sensors, to thermostats, to intelligent plug sockets. Hive wanted a compelling way to showcase their product range to an audience that is typically scared of the technology it creates.
Working alongside Because Experiential Marketing, we created a series of three 90 second 360 experiences to explain a handful of Hive products – smart plugs, smart light bulbs, networked camera and thermostat.
The campaign was called “Let’s Get Living” and the focus of the experiences revolved around the benefits using the products gave the user, staying clear of technical jargon that may distance the audience.
The experiences took three real-world scenarios and applied the Hive technology:
- Viewer is on holiday and has forgotten to turn the iron off; using the Hive app the user is shown how to remotely check and manipulate the plug sockets
- Viewer is surrounded by woodland on a winters day; on a break they use the Hive app to turn on the heating and hot water ahead of them arriving home
- The viewer is having a break from playing tennis to check on the pet dog via the app’s live camera feed
The experiences were used across a number of retail activations in the UK and US.
Technical Delivery
We chose the Unreal Engine to create the series of experiences, with After Effects to produce the text and graphical overlays. Understanding the audience was highly likely to have never experienced 360, we took the decision to keep the spectator view fixed to reduce the possibility of sim-sickness. We devised a series of animations that meant the ‘stage’ assembled and changed around the viewer.
Audiences are typically in awe at VR, but in this case we were very happy that the overwhelming feedback from consumers was not on the use of VR, but on the benefits of the Hive products.
If your business needs help on how to convey technical subject matter to a non-technical audience in a compelling and engaging format, please contact us.
STUDIO: Austella
