Gatorade brings you a new hyper-real first-person avatar VR experience, one that puts you in the body of professional baseball player and Washington Nationals star, Bryce Harper. Through the 'Bryce Harper Virtual Reality Experience', fans are transported into an extraordinary situation previously available only to MLB players: stepping up to the plate, hearing the crowd roar, feeling the massive scale of the stadium and hitting it out of Nationals Park.

The 'Bryce Harper Virtual Reality Experience' takes us another step towards truly immersive experiences by transporting fans into Harper’s mind AND body, creating a sense of presence within Harper’s world.

To create the unique feeling of becoming Bryce, the team needed to give the VR avatar a physical body or the audience to transport into. While the use of avatars has been explored before, primarily in gaming, the rise of VR gives content creators a new, exciting opportunity in storytelling, going beyond the passive window into a story's world, to full immersion, and eventually, interaction.

We were involved from concept, R&D, camera rig, directing and on-set supervision to VFX and editorial. As one of the world’s first ever avatar VR experiences, this was a very complex shoot.

Being able to see Bryce’s powerful body and limbs as your own was crucial to creating an authentic ‘at the bat’ moment. The team infused motion capture and traditional hand animation to create a heightened sense of presence through the stylized Bryce avatar. It was designed to enhance the incredible, larger-than- life experience, visualizing Bryce’s power and athleticism with a hyper-real dream environment.

To create an intimate immersive experience, binaural audio was used to recreate the depth of sound within an amphitheatre stadium.

The entire piece was shot stereoscopically, giving the experience a huge boost of realism via 3D depth, and allowing viewers to feel like they are really there.

A 14-camera 360 rig was used on set, capturing huge amounts of data on a multitude of plates, which were then seamlessly stitched together in post-production using 2D compositing.