Let me take a moment of your time and tell you about the site we recently developed for the new Honda Accord.

What started as a prototype that saw 3D dots swarm from location to location, has evolved into an interesting microsite that shows off the Accord’s most revolutionary features.

Central to the campaign is the TV advertisement which educates the audience about the Accord’s revolutionary new Variable Cylinder Management technology (VCM) which allows the car to transition between six, four and three cylinders when the car senses the demand. The ad pushes this USP with the aid of a drumming metaphor, in which the cylinder states are mapped to drummers standing along side of the road - when the car needs power, it’s in six cylinder mode and drummers provide the soundtrack with a 6-beat rhythm whilst playing on six big drums… etc etc. You can see the commercial on the home page of the site.

Initially working closely with the local office of Draft FCB, we cemented a concept that tied the idea of ‘dots’ to the drums theme and the core VCM message. The idea was that I would create an engine that would allow the car to essentially be the puppeteer of an endless supply of dots - for example, when the car needed a road, the dots would swarm to form a road.

The DotEngine was created and I devised a number of demonstrations to illustrate its versatility - I’m planning on showing you a bit more on this at a later date. The DotEngine prototype also had an editor, called the DotEditor, in which I could pre-program and test dot configurations and patterns. I built in everything from music visualisation patterns, to particle generators, to a dot-text and heightmap rendering system. Only some of these ended up making it into the final delivery as rendering performance issues (which continue to be the bane of my existence) made some of the effects unusable. The offline prototype easily supported many hundreds of dots at a time smoothly transitioning from one state to another.

The above image demonstrates the dots in road-mode where I mapped the floor plane in a supplied 3D animation to the Z axis of the DotEngine. This scene, along with the Power transition (discussed below) are the strongest examples of harmony between the car hero and the DotEngine concept.

In an attempt to keep the number of key communication sections in the site to a minimum, we introduced the idea of transition messages. When a user enters a section for the first time, whilst the preloader for that section is doing its thing, the dots maintain a simple dialog with the visitor by reinforcing the core messages: Power, Space, Size etc. My favorites are Power (which you’ll see when you enter the Performance section, pictured above) and Space (in the Inside section).

As you may have guessed, Papervision3D was used to get the 3D effects happening. Hats off, once again, to Carlos and the team for providing the community with such an invaluable tool.

I hope you find the site interesting - and I’ll make sure to show you a few more behind-the-scenes snippets in the posts to come.

Link: NewAccord.com.au