During the first semester of 2012, YDreams, through its offices in Rio and São Paulo, has been launching some pretty impressive projects for some very impactful brands. The first, Rio’s Light Energy Museum (Museu Light da Energia) was followed shortly by “Senna Emotion“ an interactive exhibition dedicated to iconic Formula One champion Aryton Senna. The latest and most recent, the Cervejaria Bohemia (Bohemia Brewery) experience in the historic city of Petropolis in Rio de Janeiro state, officially opened its doors to the general public this past May 5th, 2012.
The project, which has become a milestone for YDreams both in Brazil and around the world, features the company’s creative technologies as the driving force behind an innovative project – the first of its kind in Latin America – that offers visitors a unique voyage into the art, culture and history of beer brewing at the recently refurbished brewery.
AmBev, a subsidiary of global brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the biggest brewery in Latin America, Rio de Janeiro State government and Petropolis Municipality, recently joined forces to reopen Cervejaria Bohemia in historic Petropolis. The renovated brewery, deactivated in 1998, will, in addition to resuming beer production, offers visitors an immersive Bohemia experience guaranteed to satisfy even the most demanding beer connoisseur.
“YDreams, in collaboration with São Paulo-based Criacitta, who were responsible for the center’s scenography, has created a technological state of the art project, where the objective is to offer visitors an immersive and unforgettable experience”, explains Karina Israel, YDreams Brasil’s Executive Director, “with the Cervejaria Bohemia center, technology is but the means to an end, and not the end in itself; here technology is used ultimately to enhance the visitor experience and increase Bohemia brand recall”.
Throughout the entire center YDreams used environmental intelligence as the cornerstone for Cervejaria Bohemia’s technological conception; access points embedded into the natural environment, simple, intuitive, easy to use interfaces, real-time, adaptable content, visitor recognition and the ability to share visitor experiences, photos and videos directly on social media networks are what make a visit to the center the ultimate beer brewing experience.
Numerous impactful technologies, designed to blur the boundary between the real and the virtual, were deployed at the Cervejaria Bohemia center. Listed below are some of Cervejaria Bohemia’s highlights:
- The “Elevator Experience” – visitors are treated to a virtual flyover of the brewery’s production facilities plus a 180º immersive video projection on a dome. The video dictates the brewery’s immediate physical environment, e.g. images of fiery furnaces yield hot blowing air and so forth;
- The ability to walk upon a river of beer, explore the pages of ancient monk scrolls using simple hand gestures;
- Creating your own customized Bohemia shield in the center tavern;
- Learn all about ingredients such as malt barley and hops that go into making beer;
- Stimulating interactive games that partake the art of beer brewing, while visitors play with natural user interfaces that use 3D cameras (similar to the ones used in Kinect);
- Visitors can take pictures of themselves immersed in fields of barley or other backgrounds allusive to the art of brewing and send it to their friends, or print it out as a unique and memorable Cervejaria Bohemia beer bottle label;
- Everything visitors experience at the center will be stored in a ‘virtual cloud’ associated to bracelets visitors receive when arriving at the center. The unique code embedded in each bracelet may be uploaded onto computers using the internet, or shared via social media links (e.g. Facebook & Twitter) at interactive multi-touch tables at the end of the Cervejaria Bohemia center.
