Meta · Mercedes-Benz
Meta engaged Astral City to design something genuinely new: a luxury automotive experience that brings the warmth, personalisation and trust of a real conversation into digital, powered by the extraordinary visuals only XR can deliver. Not a sales tool. Not a configurator. A hyper-personalised, voice-led Mixed Reality experience that could reach Mercedes customers where they are, in their homes, at scale, without losing an ounce of the brand.
The warmth of a personal conversation. The utility of a hard-working tool.
Meta set the bar by referencing Cupra's Mixed Reality showroom and asking for something ten times better, in the home, not the dealership. The brief was deliberately open, but the tensions inside it were sharp. It had to carry the full weight of the Mercedes marque: aspirational, warm, prestige-first. And it had to work: hyper-personalised, genuinely useful, conversational. Making something that felt like luxury and functioned like a tool, for a new audience without losing the existing one, was the design challenge.
A concept sprint that produced three distinct routes and one that went straight into build.
We ran a focused creative sprint: decode the brief, diverge wide, converge on a lead, visualise relentlessly. Small, senior team. No big reveals. By delivery, the package gave Meta and Mercedes the breadth to choose with confidence and the depth to act. The concept package contained one fully-developed lead route (Sensory Studio), one complementary direction (Automotive Ambassador) and four creative thought-starters. Automotive Ambassador was selected for build based on its blend of creative ambition, technical feasibility and the clarity of the hypotheses it could test.
Three distinct concept routes developed from a blank brief, with the depth and clarity for a client to choose and act. A lead route developed to full resolution; complementary directions developed far enough to diverge meaningfully; thought-starters to signal the breadth of the space.
Persona, Purpose, Place, Protocol: a repeatable framework built for this sprint that has since informed every AI character project Astral City has shipped. Warm, attentive and trusted — without tipping into over-familiarity.
Non-linear, voice-led MR vignettes designed for the home, not the dealership, built around five storytelling pillars from Innovation to Future. Spatial storytelling that makes the home the showroom.
Preserve prestige, protect privacy, personalise without over-familiarity. The Mercedes marque demands that every creative decision — from AI tone to interaction pacing — earns its place. Art direction, moodboards and 3D-style frames built fast and on brief.
"A concept phase that moves quickly and with intent doesn't just win rooms. It builds the foundation that everything after is built on."
The concept phase wasn't a deliverable. It was the foundation.
Automotive Ambassador was selected for build based on its creative ambition, technical feasibility and the clarity of the hypotheses it set. The sprint also produced something more durable: a four-part conversational AI framework — Persona, Purpose, Place, Protocol — that has since informed every AI character project Astral City has shipped.
Concept phases are where most premium experiences find their soul or quietly lose it. The risks are well-rehearsed: decks that don't survive contact with engineering, concepts that test the brief instead of the brand, novelty for novelty's sake. Astral City was built to do this part well. We move quickly because we move with intent: a clear method, seasoned creative leadership, and an unwillingness to pitch a route we couldn't actually build. The Mercedes-Benz creative sprint is one of the cleanest examples of that method in action. The concept went straight into build. That is the proof point that matters.
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