We wanted to create an immersive participatory experience, one that would treat our guests not just to a sneak peek of the show, but give them the effect that they were actually visiting the Westworld park, by combining cutting-edge VR technology, a luxury physical setting and a live theatrical experience with actors acting as artificial hosts.

Our solution was a theatrical and VR experience that immersed guests in the world of Westworld, featuring live actors playing AI-guided hosts, and sets built to resemble a corporate outpost of the fictional Delos Corporation. In this way, guests achieved full immersion before then strapping on the VR headset and diving deeper into the storyworld.

At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, and New York Comic Con, etched metal appointment cards were issued to a select list of guests, who could then visit at their appointed time and receive a personalized front of house theatrical experience before being guided into an 11-minute virtual simulation running on an HTC Vive.

Through a combination of live theater, custom installation, and virtual reality, guests were fully transported to the fictional resort to take part in a tale that begins seductively but ends in dystopian terror.

Nearly 2,000 people went through the experience. Their social shares, as well as copious amounts of A-List press coverage (Variety, VentureBeat, Mashable, Business Insider), yielded a tremendous number of PR impressions for Westworld and HBO.

Specifically, the activation reached 4,846,275 impressions on Twitter and 143,585 on Instagram. Experiential impressions reached 180,000 at NYCC and 5,000 at TechCrunch.

Above all, after the experience, fans weren’t talking about what they saw, or any specific piece of technology. They were sharing stories about their visit to Westworld, a unique event that helped contribute to a pre-premiere campaign that saw Westworld become the most-watched first season of an HBO original series ever.

By creating a participatory, destination experience that combined live theater, luxury sets, and an HTC Vive immersive VR experience, this promotional event redefined the interplay between the physical and the virtual in entertainment marketing and gave our guests the opportunity to set foot in an imaginary storyworld.

Given that our high-end destination experience would serve as a catalyst for press coverage and word of mouth, we focused on two key influential audiences who we believed would be our strongest evangelists: the tech elite and start-up entrepreneurs, to whom we would position Delos (the fictional company who created Westworld) as a similar “technology start-up company”; and pop culture fans - revealing Westworld as the ultimate in luxury entertainment destinations. We then identified two events to intersect with these targets – Techcrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and the New York Comicon.

HBO’s newest drama – Westworld – is set in a luxury entertainment resort, where the virtual meets the physical, and where artificial “hosts” allow guests to play out their darkest fantasies. As a dystopian take on the future of theme parks, the narrative conceit is uniquely positioned to play into contemporary discussions of immersive entertainment, VR, and participatory storytelling. And so to promote the season premiere, we aimed to create awareness, consumer participation, and online buzz by bringing a piece of that fictional storyworld to life in a real-world setting.