Space age school trip

US – Advertising agency McCann New York has turned an ordinary school bus into a Mars Rover, taking students on a virtual tour of the red planet.

• Our Mars is the first headset-free group virtual reality vehicle experience
• The windows screened 200 square miles of Martian surface

Experience designers Framestore fitted the windows with transparent 4K screens, enabling the students to share in the experience without headsets, and used open gaming development software Unreal to map the virtual surface, enabling the landscape to change to reflect the speed and direction of the bus.

Students that were on the journey to Washington DC were selected from Girls Inc, a non-profit-making organisation that focuses on giving young girls confidence, and 4H, a Ghanaian youth development organisation.

The campaign is part of Generation Beyond, an educational initiative set up by arms and aerospace conglomerate Lockheed Martin, which hopes to inspire more young people to pursue STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).