Dior wanted sparkle and shine for the holidays, so we collaborated with Meta to bring some elegant AR wonder to their holiday campaign: Dream in Dior.
Four site-specific experiences in Seoul and Paris, an at-home experience, and a point-of-sale experience across hundreds of locations adorned and transformed multiple environments through a blanket of stars, glittering artworks, and ornate visual feasts.
Paris
Pop-up “L’atelier des Reves” was a magical holiday pop-up in a historic mansion on Paris’ beautiful Parc Monceau. Over several weeks, Dior completely redecorated the mansion, creating a workshop of dreams. Guests enjoyed two acts of bespoke AR, which — for maximum immersion — had been designed for, and calibrated to each room, Le Grand Salon and L’Espace Parfums.
Act I in Le Grand Salon launched from an image target that the guest scanned on a freestanding stele. A trail of stardust leads the guest to pivot and observe the ceiling around the room’s central chandelier, located above the lavishly decorated dining table. The room’s ceiling was replaced with an endless starry dome of Pietro Ruffo’s imagination. Guests explored the celestial subjects by tapping them, bringing them to life through animation.
In Act II, upstairs in the L’Espace Parfums, guests set themselves among the heavens while interacting with the shimmering, falling stars.
Seoul
The Seoul activation led shoppers on a dazzling journey configured to the store’s layout. Act I of the experience begins in the Chandelier Room, where Pietro Ruffo’s constellation artwork lights up and beams brightly above the J’Adore Chandelier. Act II, in the Dinner de la Colle Noir, is a second experience with sparkling, falling stardust that blankets users as they interact with the environment.
Dior Constellations
Dior Constellations is an AR reimagining of Pietro Ruffo’s intricate artwork available to interact with at hundreds of Dior beauty point of sale locations. We were tasked with bringing the figures in the two-dimensional etched illustration to life through animated interactive constellations.
To keep the AR effects performant, we kept the animation loops for our seven figures short and slow. We used baked animations for more complex assets that required it, like the constellations. We programmed particle animations and texture transition animations in Spark directly to fit within our constraints.
We compressed all textures to work within the data budget before bringing them into Spark. Since we used multiple 4k and 8k textures for the sky domes in the scene, we used a custom patch to string together various 1k textures.
Dior Stars
Dior Stars is an effect available globally that immerses users in a night sky featuring figures from Pietro Ruffo’s artwork. By interacting with the scene, users transform these constellations into the iconic Dior products Sauvage, J’Adore, or Miss Dior, while dispersing stars across the environment through touch gestures on their device.
The defining feature of the Dior Stars is the product reveal/disappear transitions, which went through several rounds of experimentation and design to get just right. Our first attempt was a custom dissolve animation that gave us control over the extraneous details and visually matched how the filigrees (the ornate, intricate patterns) looked —but ultimately, it still felt too distracting as a transition. To synchronize with the client’s vision, we opted for a simple fade-in/fade-out of each of the main elements: the product materials, the constellations, and the filigrees.
We combined Fresnel effects with custom glass shaders using multiple layers of render passes to simulate glass in real-time rendering with reflection and refraction faithfully. This combination helped create a differing reflectance on the surface of each product depending on the angle from which the viewer stood.
COMPANY: Buck
