Aviva Launch ‘World First’ Fan Experience

Fans who enter the Aviva Stadium 3D Experience will take on the role of a player who has been plucked from obscurity and called up to play for Ireland. They will take a 3D virtual tour and live the life of either a rugby or soccer player on matchday.

The Aviva Stadium 3D Experience allows the user to experience the tension and excitement ahead of an international rugby or soccer match in the first person, with their name and picture featured during the film.

The journey begins with the participant as a relatively unknown player, who on the day before a big international match gets a call-up to play for Ireland.

Throughout the journey they will travel to the Aviva Stadium on the team bus, meet the physio for a personal briefing and get a pep talk in the dressing room from either Declan Kidney or Giovanni Trapattoni. The participant will also interact virtually with sporting commentators George Hook and Packie Bonner, rugby heroes Rob Kearney and Donncha O’Callaghan and soccer stars Liam Lawrence and Keith Andrews.

The Experience squeezes all the thrills of the 24 hours before the match whistle into a unique five-minute 3D journey, and reaches a dramatic conclusion when the participant runs onto the pitch at a packed Aviva Stadium.

The content is all shot in POV (point of view) 3D, and delivered on personal 24-inch 3D video screens inside the giant yellow Aviva machine. It is housed in a ‘Formula 1’ style customer experience unit and will be at the Aviva Stadium on matchdays as well as attending major events and festivals around Ireland.

Based on the concept of recognising the unique events in the life of an international squad player in the run up to a big game, Aviva commissioned Verve Arena to build the Aviva Stadium 3D Experience project.

Completion of the project included enlisting Ireland squad players and coaches/managers, casting hundreds of ardent supporters for filming crowd scenes at the Aviva Stadium and a digital marketing specialist to deliver the personalisation software as well as hiring a filmmaker to create the film and a custom trailer engineer to build the unit.

Commenting on the Aviva Stadium 3D Experience, Alan Tyrrell from Aviva said: “This is about recognising the thrill, pressure and passion of being called up to represent Ireland at national team level.

“Most of us will never experience the thrill of arriving on the team bus on matchday, the tension and excitement in the Irish dressing room and that great moment of running onto the Aviva Stadium pitch in front of 50,000 fans.

“The Aviva Experience allows us to give fans all over Ireland an opportunity to be part of sporting history.”

Ronan Traynor of Verve Arena highlights that this is a big step forward in experiential marketing in Ireland, with the 3D element playing a major part.

“3D is very much the next big thing, and is a first for Ireland from a visual perspective,” he said.

“Following this unique and innovative brief from Aviva, we spent a number of months developing this concept.

“We see the world in three dimensions, so in many ways the shift from 2D to 3D is as significant as the move from black and white to colour.

“This represents a real leap forward and Aviva’s vision in embracing this type of technology to create such a unique brand experience. Creating 3D personalised video has never been done before.”

BACKGROUND INFO ON AVIVA STADIUM 3D EXPERIENCE:

– This is the world’s first personalised 3D journey. It is personalised in a number of ways – audio personalisation, visual personalisation.

– Audio personalisation: 400 first names have been recorded by the voices in the film to be used within the experience: the top 150 female names in Ireland, the top 150 male names in Ireland and the top 100 surnames in Ireland

– If you have both a first name and surname that are stored in the system then both will be used during your experience. If you have either one or the other – they will be used. If you have neither, then it is a more universal experience, however your name will still appear in the written parts of the personalisation and your photo is still used.

– All users will see the visual personalisation. Their name will appear on a banner in the crowd, their surname will appear over their jersey in the dressing room and their picture will appear on the news broadcast that is shown during the film.

– First-ever 3D film shot in Ireland.

– The film was shot in ‘Point of View’. This means the camera is used as if it were the person viewing the film. It was shot using a steady camera held at head height so it moved as if to replicate the movements of the person.

– A camera with two lenses, which mimics the right and left eyes, was used for the shoot. One camera mimics the right eye and one the left. After the shoot the pixels from each lens were put together to create the effect that the viewer is actually ‘in’ the movie.

– Verve (www.verve.ie) is the leading experiential agency in Ireland and winner of the recent ‘Best Event Management Company’ award.

– The trailer unit was specifically built from scratch to house the Experience. The Vipex team started with two huge steel girders and they built up the chassis and all the structural elements as well as the hydraulics.

– The area inside the Experience trailer is based on the actual dressing rooms at the Aviva Stadium with similar fixtures, colours, etc.

– The trailer unit is fully self-contained with its own generator, air-conditioning and crew room.

– The trailer is wheelchair accessible with a wall of one of the cubicles being detachable to allow a wheelchair fit comfortably in.

– V-stream (www.vstream.ie), a leading digital marketing specialist in Ireland, wrote the bespoke technology, created specifically for the Aviva Stadium 3D Experience.

– All extras in the movie are either Aviva staff, Aviva Stadium Facebook fans that answered a call for extra or friends and family of the filmmakers.

– A Dublin-based band called ‘Sixteen Layers’ have their original song ‘Into the Sun’ featured in the Aviva Stadium 3D Experience.

– Aviva are proud to have supported the building of the new Aviva Stadium. Aviva are also proud to be playing a part in the development of new generations of Irish sporting heroes through sponsorship of Irish grassroots football and rugby programmes.