This week, Framestore’s project Field Trip to Mars, is featured on the gatefold cover of AdWeek and winner of the top honor of the Project Isaac Awards. With technical details about the project on the inside cover and a deeper dive interview by Marty Swant.

The outside features [from left-to-right] the McCann team of Dan Donovan, Josh Grossberg, Rok Koletar, Nathy Aviram, Chance Bassett, Lisa Nocella and Mike Medieros. Ken Darby from Lockheed in the foreground with yours truly flying off the back.

This Invention Issue celebrates the winners of this year’s Project Isaac Awards which Field Trip to Mars won both a Creative and Event/Experience Isaac along with winning the top honor, the Gravity Award.

From the AdWeek piece:

“With VR, you always think it’s goggles and glasses,” says McCann senior producer Chance Bassett. “But there’s nothing in the definition that says goggles and glasses. That’s just so far how we’ve been able to do it. This just opens up a whole new world. It’s VR without being isolated, which just is amazing because as humans we experience things together.”

“The hard part was how the hell to turn a bus into a headset,” Rea says. “How do you turn a bus into a game controller? You have to remember, you’re inside looking out the windows of a bus that’s inside of a video game. So it’s kind of an inception moment because you’re inside this bus that’s a controller. So the bus turns left, it turns right, and that movement has to be represented on the screens in the video game.”

To develop the experience, the team used a system associated with video games to recreate the twists, turns and bumps of a school bus. That required the creation of a 200-square-mile Martian landscape. Whatever the bus did in reality had to be replicated in VR. To do that, the team gathered data about all the maneuvers and speeds of the vehicle. While the bus didn’t travel the entire 200 miles, all that extra space was necessary in case the driver had to go off course or change routes.