Description:

For David Bowie’s 75th birthday and 50 years of Ziggy Stardust, Adobe created a digital toolkit worthy of a Starman. As part of the celebration, we recreated Bowie’s dressing room: the physical anchor point to his creativity and the place where his alter ego Ziggy Stardust was born. The Virtual Dressing Room allows you to experience Bowie’s creative process and discover some hidden treasures.

To bring you into David Bowie’s personal universe, we started with a 1972 reference photo of Bowie transforming himself in his dressing room. Vibrant, alive, and intimate, it immediately transports you inside the room. We aimed to stay as true as possible to the atmosphere of the photo, to give you the feeling that you’re actually stepping back in time to the early seventies.

To make it feel like you’re moving around inside the photo we used a combination of 3D-modeled assets and 2D images projected onto a simplified mesh. By using this hybrid approach and adjusting the lighting, textures, atmospheric effects and depth of field, we were able to achieve a photographic aesthetic while still allowing you freedom of movement inside the room.

The gameplay involves you sneaking into the dressing room to find nine objects of significance. Each of the hidden objects can be downloaded as assets into the Adobe environment. Partway through the treasure hunt, we introduce a time limit to put you under pressure and push you to find the remaining treasures before he returns.

The end result was an immersive experience that transported users back in time to David Bowie’s dressing room circa 1972. With the Adobe x Bowie toolkit making headlines in online publications around the globe and organic traffic driven by social media, thousands of users flocked to the site. Our players couldn’t get enough of the dressing room atmosphere with the average user replaying the game 6.52 times, proving it was truly an experience worthy of a Starman.