LEXUS

In the competitive luxury automotive market, customers are time-poor and spoiled for choice. So, when Lexus was preparing to launch the new IS Series globally, the traditional approach of printed brochures, static imagery and waiting for physical cars to arrive in showrooms, was not going to be enough. Lexus needed a way to give customers and sales teams a genuinely immersive experience of the car before a single vehicle had landed in a dealership.

The challenge was twofold. First, to communicate the complex engineering and technology behind the Lexus IS in a way that felt simple, intuitive and compelling. Second, to do it at global scale across multiple markets, languages and environments, both online and off.

Apadmi created an augmented reality app that gave customers and salespeople x-ray vision of the product from every angle. The app allowed users to explore the design, interior, features, mechanics and engineering of the vehicle in full 3D, from anywhere in the world, before the car was even available to see in person.

360-degree augmented reality, engineered for performance

Delivering a photorealistic 3D model of a car in augmented reality at the quality Lexus demanded is not a trivial technical task. High-quality visual and audio assets are data-heavy by nature, and the app needed to perform in a wide range of real-world environments. This included being able to use the product in showrooms with unreliable connectivity, at remote locations, and across the full range of devices used by sales teams and customers across 35 countries.

Apadmi solved this by downloading and storing 3D asset data locally on device, ensuring the experience remained fast and fluid regardless of network conditions. The result is a seamless augmented reality experience that works as well in a rural dealership with patchy Wi-Fi as it does in a flagship city showroom.

The app offered full 360-degree augmented reality, enabling customers to rotate their view of the car in any direction — looking at it from any angle, as if it were physically present in the room with them. Colour, wheels, interior finishes and optional extras could all be changed in real time, giving every customer a personalised view of their ideal configuration.

Unlike traditional print brochures, content (including prices, specifications and features) could be updated automatically, ensuring sales teams always had the most current product information at their fingertips, wherever they were in the world.

A new chapter in the automotive buying journey

The Lexus IS app changed what a car launch could look like. For the first time, sales teams had a tool that could put a fully configurable, photorealistic version of an undelivered car in front of a customer. The app provided a completely interactive, three-dimensional experience customers could explore themselves.

For customers, it removed the need to imagine. For salespeople, it removed the need to wait. For Lexus, it created a consistent, controllable brand experience across every market simultaneously, something that no amount of printed material could achieve.