Lockheed Martin partnered with McCann to help let the world know they were leading the space revolution. Our approach, was to target a generation that will be the first to colonize Mars tomorrow. The first people to live on Mars, are sitting in school today. To inspire and engage the scientists and technologists of tomorrow, I worked with a talented team to create the world’s first Group VR experience to transport these students to the surface of Mars.

The Strategy

Lockheed Martin was the lead contractor on the Orion, the first spacecraft designed to take humans to Mars. But, Lockheed Martin was being overshadowed by pop culture. We needed to show that Lockheed Martin doesn’t just talk about space: They build spaceships. We wanted to get more kids to care about going into space because today’s kids will be tomorrow’s Martian explorers. So we decided: Let’s send them to Mars on a school bus. We created a VR experience, “The Field Trip To Mars,” that turns a ride on an ordinary yellow school bus into a virtual reality tour of 200 miles of the Martian surface. Lockheed Martin’s message was clear: Nobody can take us further.

The Results

The bus arrived at the Lockheed Martin sponsored 2016 U.S.A. Science and Engineering Festival. We later worked with Lockheed Martin to launch a wider initiative, Generation Beyond, to continue inspiring and engaging the scientists and technologists of tomorrow.

The bus continues to tour the United States, inspiring people of all ages.

We even received some notable attention:

Steve Frick (CAPTAIN, USN, RET.) NASA Astronaut

“It’s going to be just a great outreach tool,” Frick said, “having something mobile like that, that’s able to go out to where kids are and give them the experience first-hand of what it might be like to be on Mars. Hopefully it’ll get them wanting to learn more and look for other materials which we’re also hoping to provide [by] getting our online curriculum out into the schools.”

Michael Yapp (founder and director of Google Zoo) at C2

“But an even better path forward is McCann New York’s and Framestore’s ‘Mars Experience Bus’ for Lockheed Martin” which Yapp also called “one of the best examples I’ve seen of VR.”