The world’s biggest human migration goes virtual with ‘The Journey Home’ created by F5 Shanghai

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01 Cover Image.jpgThe biggest mass human migration in the world occurs around the Lunar New Year in China. Millions of people crowd into all kinds of transport in order to go home and celebrate the occasion. Most travel by car or bus.

To mark this occasion, Wang Lao Ji, China’s biggest and most celebrated traditional herbal drink brand, collaborates with Baidu to launch an interactive and virtual go home experience called ‘The Journey Home’.

Shanghai-based independent agency F5 created and produced ‘The Journey Home’. After choosing the departure and destination point, users can instantly have their unique 30-second journey home video clip that combines street view clips of the cities along the users’ journey home.

09 How It Works.jpeg06 Jingzhou Street View.jpg04 Street View Capture Vehicle.jpgFor added fun, users can also choose from an array of filters and music options to personalize their videos and directly share their mini road movies on Chinese social media.

The application would not have been made possible without Baidu Street View. Street View provides interactive panorama from positions along the streets. Vehicles with mounted multi-lens camera are used to capture Street View’s 360-degree panoramic images.

Artificial intelligence is used for the development of this application. First, the machine learning algorithm selects street view images authorized by Baidu Map and marks them accordingly, for example, skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, country roads, highways, etc. Then, these images are rendered into video clips to be stored in the cloud.

Finally, according to the starting and ending points selected by each user, the application calculates and plans the route, matches the passing cities under simulated driving navigation, retrieves and combines the street view video clips of the relevant cities, and composes the video with music, copy, and personalized closing credits.

In order to offer users unique experiences, F5 collected street view clips covering more than 600 cities in China, totaling more than 100 million route combinations, thus the repetition rate is extremely low.

‘The Journey Home’ created history in China when more than 1.6 million users went home virtually and shared their journey in the first 2 days of launch.

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