Sony promotes Smurfs sequel with HoloLens mixed reality experience
- Thursday, April 6th, 2017
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With VR having become a relatively common promotional tool for movies, Sony Pictures has gone one step further to push its upcoming Smurfs: The Lost Village, creating a mixed reality experience for Microsoft’s HoloLens device.
Created by OMD and AOL’s Partner Studio, in collaboration with production company Unit9, the experience places locations from the film onto surfaces in the real world around the HoloLens user. A simple game tasks the player with exploring these locations and find the titular Lost Village.
The HoloLens isn’t exactly a mainstream proposition, given that there’s not yet a consumer version of technology in the market. The experience seems to be intended more as a showcase of how brands can leverage mixed reality in future. A behind-the-scenes video of the game has also been created to push awareness more broadly, which will be distributed across 16 markets across the world.
“Smurfs: The Lost Village takes moviegoers into the world of the Smurfs, and the HoloLens allows us to go one better: to bring our world and the Smurfs’ together in a mixed-reality setting,” said Elias Plishner, EVP digital marketing at Sony Picture Entertainment. “It’s huge fun for the moviegoer that perfectly whets the appetite for the movie.”