Photo: Distillery Trail

VR Advertising Takes Flight: Firstborn Creates a VR Experience for Patrón

On May 1st, New York creative agency Firstborn launched an immersive virtual reality experience for Patrón. Titled the “Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience,” the project takes viewers on an interactive journey to Patrón’s Hacienda distillery in the highlands of Jalisco, Mexico.

In developing the experience, Patrón Spirits’ Global Chief Marketing Officer Lee Applebaum saw virtual reality as the ideal medium to share the brand’s rich tradition:

“While many brands are utilizing virtual reality largely for entertainment, Patrón is leveraging this incredible interactive technology as a unique educational tool, to give an immersive, behind-the-scenes look into the artisanal process of making our handcrafted tequila.”

The “Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience” presents this process from the perspective of a bee exploring the Hacienda distillery. Viewers are taken on a journey covering the tequila’s creation, beginning with agave harvesting and ending with a finished product in the company’s iconic bottles. Web viewers can explore this story via the interactive 360 video content hosted on Patrón’s website as well as the 360 video below.

"Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience"
Firstborn and Air Mob teams filmed the “Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience” with a drone-mounted H3Pro7. Photo: Firstborn

To create the interactive VR content, Firstborn and Aerial Mob pilots filmed with a 360Heros H3Pro7 mounted on a custom drone configuration. With these tools, they were able to capture an aerial 360° perspective of the Hacienda facility and its surrounding environment.

The H3Pro7 is a 7-camera system for filming high resolution (7,500 x 3,750 pixels) 360 video content. It positions five cameras around the horizon, giving it a high degree of frame overlap along the unit’s horizontal field of view. This frame overlap allows users to film in close quarter environments without having common parralax issues such as distortion and warping between each individual camera’s frames.

The team from Firstborn took advantage of this frame overlap as they filmed with the H3Pro7 in close proximity to the bottom of the drone, on a mobile tripod mount and inside of Patrón’s facilities. The H3Pro7 features two mounting points that are positioned where three lenses converge. This means content creators are able to stitch out, or mask, how the rig is mounted in final 360 video outputs. The end result was a seamless 360 video experience that viewers can enjoy via the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and web-based 360 video players.

For the VR community, the “Art of Patrón Virtual Reality Experience” represents one of the most impressive instances of VR brand story telling to date. 360Heros would like to congratulate Firstborn and Patrón on this fantastic project and inspiring creativity in the use of our VR/360 video gear.

For more VR news and updates, check out the 360Heros Newsletter and feel free to share your thoughts on this project in the comments!