Waymo 360 Experience

Waymo, Google’s Self driving car company announced that their autonomous cars were now on public roads. Waymo wanted to educate everyone about the invisible technology Waymo uses to drive itself, and to feel what it’s like to take a ride. Using the 360° YouTube was the perfect format for demonstrating what the car sees all around. It also meant the film could be experienced on a laptop, mobile or in VR.

Waymo uses a range of technology to identify, predict and plan in a fraction of a second, processing millions of data points to ensure a safe and comfortable ride. The creative challenge was to visualise this raw data in a way for everyone to understand and experience what it’s like to be driven by Waymo for themselves.

Working closely with Waymo’s engineering team we created a visual language that was simple and educational. Highlighting how objects are categorised, speed and distance determined and how Waymo predicts what each object might do in a fraction of a second all the way around it.

We used the real lidar data to visualise how the car see’s the world and radar that measures the distance and speed of objects

Using a combination of these technologies Waymo can identify, predict and plan from 3 football pitches away. We demonstrated this by filming an aerial view of an intersection using a drone.

Once we showed how the technology worked the YouTube 360° format gave everyone a chance to take a ride and experience what it feels like to be driven by Waymo.