Home with Drew Barrymore

Customers could enter a virtual home environment and interact with a Drew Barrymore avatar who would guide them through her home collection, demonstrating products in context and helping them visualize items in their own spaces.

To accomplish this, we had to overcome fundamental challenges:

Photo-realism - Merchandised items must be accurate to the physical products they represent. We crafted furniture to be structurally appropriate, with colors and textures true to form.

Architecturally sound environments - VR spaces that consumers explore had to look and feel like actual homes. We hired traditional architects to create environmental blueprints.

Interaction paradigms - Unlike web and mobile, VR lacked decades of standardization. A built-for-purpose design system had to be codified from scratch.

Avatar interaction design - Creating believable avatar hosts like Drew Barrymore required natural gesture systems, conversational flow, and spatial awareness to guide users through product experiences.

Additionally, VR was not ubiquitous in people's homes at the time. A location-based system was required to meet consumers where they were, in-store. This included:

• Designing, fabricating, and constructing physical VR pods with integrated technology for operating at scale, deployed in stores

• A custom-built VR control system, hardware-agnostic for remote deployments and live monitoring

• A queue management system to optimize wait times, manage throughput, and track live operations