Thanks to Pepsi Max’s new ‘Unbelievable’ advertising campaign, sleepy morning commuters waiting for their bus saw Oxford street being invaded by aliens, destroyed by a giant robot, being hit by meteors from space, and being stalked by a massive tiger.
But Pepsi didn’t build a giant robot or free dangerous animals on the streets of the British capital, they achieved this through an advanced digital capture augmented reality screen that was installed in place of the glass window of an urban bus stop.
The display used hidden cameras to capture the image of the street as if looking through a regular glass window, then overlayed that footage with spectacular visual effects that integrated perfectly with the normal scene going by outside the screen.
This process, called Augmented Reality, gives the illusion that the bizarre events described are happening in real life.
The result had commuters exhibiting a wide range of reactions, from delight to disbelief to utter terror!
Pepsi also set up hidden cameras to capture the reactions, and compiled them into a promotional video.
Some were fooled and others figured it out right away, (check out the guy scrutinizing the display for the hidden camera at the end) but everyone seemed to think it was very cool, and it certainly added some drama to an otherwise dreary commute to work!