Range Rover VR Concepts Initial Proposal By Studio Transcendent Studio Transcendent is committed to helping people understand themselves and the world better. Art Worlds In real life, you enter the South Coast Plaza to do some afternoon shopping at Burberry. Stunningly situated on the concourse is a new Range Rover. Two people are walking around it wearing VR headsets. A well-dressed attendant beckons you over. “Would you like to see something amazing?” As you don the headset, the South Coast Plaza disappears and is replaced by a wondrous three dimensional sculptural/painted world by a renowned artist. The car remains, anchoring the center of the work. You see the avatars of the other participants walking through the space, rendered in the style of the artwork. You discover that, as you move, the environment shifts in different ways and the speed of the shift is tied directly to your movement through space. As you move further back from the car, the painting builds up around you, stretching towards the sky. As you move in closer to the car, the painting starts to strip away until you are close enough to touch the vehicle, where it sits pearlescent in a void. If you reach out with the controller, the body panels become invisible near your hand and you can marvel at the clockwork precision of its internal design. Embodied perfectly in the world, one of the artists calls to you, “Come here and check out my design!” You walk toward them and they vanish, but you discover that as you move around the car, one artist’s vision of the world transforms into another artist’s vision. Retna’s hieroglyphics twist and disappear and are replaced by Saber’s streaks of color, which then coalesce into Brett Hammond’s caricatures, which give way to Kim Joon’s arresting classically-inspired sculptures. The artists keep appearing, beckoning you, showing you the best vantage points. Once you have seen everything, the art fades away and is replaced by a city scene, the car parked in front of a brightly lit gallery. The name of the new Range Rover is stacked atop the pavement in metal lettering. A voice says “The new Range Rover will take you on great adventures of discovery in the worlds of art and culture with the ultimate in refinement and comfort, adding a sophisticated presence to any venue. The attendants can answer any questions you have about the vehicle.” Right on cue, an attendant taps you on the shoulder and welcomes you back to reality. Fractal Art Tunnel You wake up from a roadside nap in the middle of a long night-drive and set back out on the road. You are driving an average car down a nighttime highway. Your female passenger turns up the music as you pass through a tunnel. The tunnel’s lights seem to match the feel of the music as it slowly builds. A second look reveals that you're driving through what looks like a sculpture—and now it’s moving and changing all around you. The structures transform from recognizable building parts to become a complex 3D fractal. The fractal tunnel is composed of the sculptural and hieroglyphic work of Retna, the world’s most renowned graffiti artist. Your passenger points out that your vehicle has also changed. You look around to find yourself in the interior of the new Range Rover. You come to a stop on an edifice that has emerged out of the end of the fractal tunnel. Your passenger beckons you to step out with her and get a look at your new vehicle and the vista in this beautiful, intense, abstract world. You step back to view the sculptural form of the vehicle, which is in harmony with the new world that has been constructed around you. When you step back into the vehicle, you find your passenger asleep in her seat. She wakes up and says, “I had such a cool dream. Did you? Ready to keep going?” You look forward to catch the world morphing back to the original scene you woke up in as your vehicle once again becomes average. You reach cruising speed on the nighttime highway and the new Range Rover passes by as your passenger gawks at it. “That’s the car I was dreaming about!” Over the Ridge to the Art Opening We Go You step out into the drive of your spectacular sculptural contemporary home in the Connecticut countryside. Three versions of the new Range Rover pull up in front of you. Each car is trimmed with some of the style of a different renowned contemporary artist. You must choose which ride you want to take on your adventure. Your choice will determine through which artist’s eyes you experience your trip. Your world is constructed from the work of the artist you’ve chosen as you travel past various landmarks on your way into Manhattan. Your perspective shifts occasionally from the interior of the car to a street corner as the car glides past, giving you a glimpse of its exterior before you find yourself back in the driver’s seat. You arrive at the art opening at The Whitney just in time for your artist to greet you as you step out of his/her signature vehicle. Rising Action in the Woods You find yourself seated in a post-modern home in Marin, CA, akin to the Sheats Goldstein residence. Across from you is your well-dressed host. He drinks whiskey from a 100 year old cask and offers you a toast. Around you is an agglomeration of art and, in contrast to the concrete diagonal walls of the residence, the ceiling is glass, showcasing the tall woods towering above brilliantly in the quiescence of twilight. An engine revs from afar. The whole residence starts turning inside out, morphing, until the house becomes an orchestra hall embedded into the woods with artistic remains of the mansion around you. An entire amphitheater of chairs surrounds you now, with no one in attendance but you. An orchestra plays, unseen in the pit below. Your host has become the Maestro and the engine noise gives way to silence. The new Range Rover creeps stealthily down the wide central hallway from the lobby down to the front row, as if it too wants to turn its ear to the orchestra. The wind begins to blow and it starts raining as the orchestra rises to a climax. The car creeps even further forward and turns its brights on. Fog billows in until the entire scene cascades away to the rhythm of the music. All that remains is the woods, you, and the Range Rover, which then drives closer to reveal its brilliance. It revs and flashes its brights at you. Your world goes white. You revive to find yourself back in the home, seated as you were. Your host re-offers the toast to you as if you had blanked out and failed to answer the first time. Blackout. Art Blown into Life You start out next to a flowing Zaha Hadid-inspired building in a lovely downtown area. A graffiti artist runs up to the side of the building, starts painting and quickly completes an amazing painting with a curious outline. A security guard and cop chase the artist away. All becomes silent as the day timelapses to night. Trees from the building’s courtyard loom over the side of your view and begin blowing with the wind. The city becomes silent as the wind picks up everywhere until the graffiti starts coming alive, the new Range Rover slowly emerging from the wall, stylized in the art. The artist walks back, hops in, and drives away as the wind still blows hard, peeling the art it emerged from off like a snake shedding its skin. As the car flies away down the street, under tunnels and into the darkness, the city noise picks back up and the wind dies down. Title sequence. Zoom Factors You begin standing before the tip of a pencil on paper. The pencil is so close to you and you are so small in comparison that it is the size of a giant redwood. It is moving across the page you are standing on, gently drawing a gigantic line as it arches past you. Your view is snapped back to a further vantage point. You are much bigger now. You can begin to see a context for this original line in the shapes now being drawn by the artist’s hand. You are pulled back again and now both time and scale have shifted. A craftsman is meticulously refining the shape of a body panel—the one that you witnessed being drawn—on an intricate clay model of a vehicle. You snap back again to see its manufacture as the body panel is prepared. Your view is shifted again to reveal the finished part being installed, then again to the rest of the car being assembled around you, then again so that you find yourself standing alongside the finished car, revealed in all its beauty. Your view is shifted back one last time to view the car from across the street in an appealing setting, in an appealing life. Another person also looks at the car, stops, does a double take, and takes a step back to experience the complete vehicle. The Artists The mentioned artists have been selected from Art All Ways’ roster as particularly suited to collaborate with Studio Transcendent on the Range Rover virtual reality project.