BMW i Vision Dee: Metaverse on Wheels

One Las Vegas. Four productions.

At CES 2023, BMW unveiled the i Vision Dee — a vision car pitched as the first designed to drive in the metaverse. Here the sales pitch for a physical product was a digital-first narrative, and its launch was not one thing but four: a premiere show with CEO Oliver Zipse, a public drive experience, a live-on-tape product launch, and a campaign film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. We built the one asset all of them stood on — a real-time Las Vegas you can slide from fully real to fully virtual — and became the spider in the web that kept every format telling the same story, in three to four months.

From full reality to fully virtual.

The i Vision Dee is at home in the real world and in the metaverse. A Mixed-Reality slider moves the driver between them: as it travels, the windows turn opaque and become projection screens, until the car sits fully inside a digital world.

To make that tangible, we built Las Vegas twice — a photoreal city and a metaverse version of it — and let the slider drive from one into the other.

Fully virtual — Las Vegas in the metaverse.

One world, reused four ways.

The maths that would fail any exam — 1 = 4 — became the plan. One real-time world drove four very different formats, each produced with a different partner, all sharing one look, one narrative and one set of assets. Build the world once; tell the story four times.

FORMAT 01 — PREMIERE SHOW

The premiere, told in two worlds.

BMW revealed the i Vision Dee at CES with CEO Oliver Zipse. Elastique set the reveal inside the real-time Las Vegas we had created, so the concept car appeared both in the real city and in its metaverse twin — and the same world fed the online digital experience. One narrative, two realities, from the very first showing.

FORMAT 02 — THE DRIVE EXPERIENCE

16,000 people drove it themselves.

On the CES floor, visitors did not just look at Dee — they sat in it and drove. Our first task was to turn the concept car into a fully functional driving simulator, wired to the real vehicle electronics, and to bring the metaverse inside it. With the Mixed-Reality slider, each driver chose their world: the real Las Vegas on the LED wall ahead, or a metaverse Las Vegas projected across the windows. More than 16,000 people took the wheel.

FORMAT 03 — LIVE-ON-TAPE LAUNCH

Dee is, at its core, a small HYPERBOWL.

For the moderated product launch, produced with Hochkant Film, we brought virtual-production technology into the car itself — the same principle as our HYPERBOWL studio, shrunk to fit around the driver. That let us drive live through Las Vegas, steer the in-car AR layers and run the entire studio in one take, every projection and display rendered in the correct perspective.

FORMAT 04 — CAMPAIGN FILM

Same set, after dark.

For a campaign film at Hollywood scale — starring Arnold Schwarzenegger — we flipped the same Las Vegas into a night mood and charged it with custom visual effects. Shot in our own virtual-production studio, the HYPERBOWL, a tongue-in-cheek love story turns the i Vision Dee’s concept into a future you could fall for.

Think like an agency
Design like a studio
Build like engineers.

Here the sales pitch for a physical product was itself a digital story. That suits how we work: a digital-first strategy that builds one asset and reuses it across every outlet, so the brand narrative stays harmonised from the show floor to the film.

Making the formats interlock this tightly took a partner who could consult on the strategy and deliver that one asset on time across all of them — tailoring the narrative and the build to each outlet and format, not just handing it over. It took fluency in both the artistic and the technical, design judgement and engineering depth in the same room, so we could be the enabler behind the scenes that every partner built on.

We connect branding, creative technology, film and game engines — everything it takes to bring a future narrative to life. On the i Vision Dee, that combination pulled five disciplines — product, digital experience, live event, game design and film — closer together than ever before, and opened new possibilities for brand communication. No one else does it quite the way we do.

Built once, told four times.

One real-time world, four productions, three to four months from concept to delivery — carried across a premiere, a public drive experience, a live-on-tape launch and a Hollywood-scale film.

16,000+drivers at CES
1.1Mlive-on-tape viewers
900k+campaign-film views
ADC 2023Bronze, Digital Craft