Title	WAYMO 360 EXPERIENCE
Brand	GOOGLE ARTS AND CULTURE
Product/Service	INTERACTIVE EASEL
Category	D02. Interactive Video
Entrant	GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	GOOGLE CREATIVE LAB London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	FRAMESTORE London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Google Creative Lab	Google	Creative Lead

Background

Since 2009, during their early days at Google, Waymo have been developing self driving car technology. Today, their fully self-driving cars are on public roads. They use a range of technology to see, identify, predict and plan to ensure a safe ride. But only a handful of people can actually experience being driven by them. For everyone else it’s still difficult to feel comfortable with the idea of a self-driving car. Our brief was to help people understand the technology at the heart of a Waymo car, and build trust in fully self-driving cars.

Describe the strategy

Our strategy was to enable anyone, especially people who had a mis-trust of fully self-driving cars, to see things from the point of view of the car. To be able to understand the full scope of the car’s vision, and to understand the extreme breadth of data that it gathers to understand the world around it. Also to see for themselves how it navigates complex situations, and predicts what objects will do. We concentrated on making this not only engaging, but easy to digest. And once we’d explained the technology, we wanted to enable them to feel what it’s like to be driven by all that technology. The YouTube 360 platform gave us the opportunity to do this in an easily accessible but also immersive way that honestly and accurately brought it all to life.

Describe the execution

We filmed a self-driven journey around Phoenix, Arizona, then worked with Waymo engineers to visualize in graphics the live data captured from the drive. The 360° format helps people experience the car’s constant 360° field of view, whilst the graphics show what the car actually sees. But we also wanted to enable people to feel what it’s like to ride in one, so the film gets viewers as close to this experience as possible: sitting in the backseat as the car self-drives on public roads. We made the experience viewable across devices, and ensured the design and art direction worked well on all screen sizes. Viewers move their phones around to explore, or use a virtual reality headset like Cardboard for an even more immersive experience.

List the results

Within a week, the video had over 400k organic views and was featured in mainstream publications including Forbes, Reuters and the Washington Post & Local and national news on channels such as FOX & NBC. Results show an above-average audience retention rate for the majority of the video, with users making full use of the 360 degree functionality.