The New York Times and BMW looked to The Endless Co. to build a creative AR advertising experience for deployment across NYT platforms.

From scratch, our visual effects artists rendered a photorealistic BMW X2 and placed it within a David Bowie-inspired AR portal.

Through the NYT mobile app, users step inside an AR portal and are engulfed in a maze of ribbon, inspired by costume designer Kansai Yamamoto’s collaborations with Bowie. BMW wanted to honor Bowie’s legacy alongside a recently opened exhibition in Brooklyn.

Users encounter the BMW X2 within the portal and trigger hotspots with more information.

In order to deploy the AR experience on both ARCore and ARKit, our team had to ensure low file sizes and limited polygon count while maintaining photorealism.

With the use of low-poly 3D modeling, numerous texture maps, rectilinear geometry, and shader expertise, we were able to deliver the package at less than 10mb.

Bowie Image Credit: Mary Altaffer/Associated Press @ Washington Post, Sukita/The David Bowie Archive @ John McDonald