Silicon Valley: Inside The Hacker Hostel

Background

The Emmy®-winning and Golden Globe-nominated Silicon Valley takes a comic look at the modern-day epicenter of the high-tech gold rush. Using the latest tech, HBO wanted to give fans an experience that brought them into the heart of the show.

Idea

There are over 756 things to do in this experience, and pretty much zero rules.

A fully explorable 1:1 recreation of the show’s iconic homebase - the Hacker Hostel - was created in VR, providing the most highly detailed and realistic VR representation of a TV set ever made. The experience is a hilarious virtual playground, bringing users into the heart of Silicon Valley. Authenticity and attention to detail was key. All elements were bespoke, created from the ground up to ensure consistency with the show’s aesthetic and branding. Unreal’s built-in systems, married with the studio’s own in-house VR template - specifically designed for convincing physics-based interactions - ensured a faithful replica was possible. Highly detailed blueprint designs were used to model all of the Hacker Hostel’s floors, walls, and ceilings in 3DS Max and Maya, ensuring a perfect replica. From the set, thousands of photo references were captured, including 360º captures of each room, so every last detail—even the lighting—was exactly matched. Special attention was paid to ensure textures for the likes of books, bottles, cans and all other interactive objects were bespoke and consistent with the show’s look and feel. In addition to more than 750 moveable objects, there are many interactive iconic show elements, from the Not Hot Dog app to the ‘Always Blue’ ball. The Hacker Hostel also gives users firsthand one-on-one encounters with show characters—find a secret message from Jared and help Richard out of a coding crisis. The free experience launched with the premiere of Season 5 of Silicon Valley on HTC’s Vive via the Viveport platform and was later rolled out on Oculus. A supporting webpage was created on SiliconValleyVR.com and news of the release was pushed out via the show’s social media channels and in relevant media.