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Fans can explore the Hidden World of How to Train Your Dragon 3 in Walmart VR tour

The retail giant, HP and Intel's How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World virtual tour is delighting fans of the DreamWorks animated trilogy with an experience they can take home.

By Sarah Murry — March 18, 2019

On a recent trip to Walmart, paper towels, milk and Easter candy were on the list. A ride on the back of a sharp-horned, fire-breathing dragon was not.

Yet here was a chance to get up close and personal with with Hiccup, Astrid and Toothless the Night Fury to explore the magical “Hidden World” of the recently-released third film in DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon trilogy.

Walmart is luring fans of the animated viking franchise into a unique virtual reality and retail experience, which begins in a tent rising up out of the parking lot and ends with a tour in a specially-branded gift shop full of character merch from the films. It was created by Spatial& (“spatial-and”), a Venice, California-based V-commerce startup acquired last year by Walmart’s retail incubator Store N°8. They used DreamWorks intellectual property, including the characters and the Hidden World backdrop, and wrote an original storyline. The virtual experience was created on Intel® Xeon®-powered Z by HP workstations to make them VR-ready — a massive technical feat. Walmart has used VR before to do things like train associates, but hasn’t done anything on this scale for customers.

“It’s one thing when you see it on the large screen, but another when it’s a 360-degree experience. It’s a truly magical moment.”

— Katie Finnegan, CEO, Spatial&

Inside the tent, a pair of actors in Viking couture take brave souls into the body of a 53-foot semi truck trailer outfitted with four motion-activated chairs, each powered by HP’s OMEN X VR backpack with Intel® Core™ i7. Strap on a HP Windows Mixed Reality headset and a HP OMEN Mindframe Gaming headset, and you’re instantly transported into to the dark cave entrance of the Hidden World, where you can almost feel the hot breath of a nearby dragon. The immersive experience feels even more thrilling with 360-degree sound, haptic vibrations and sudden bursts of air in the shell-like Positron chair.

What follows is a nearly five-minute soaring, rollicking ride in the company of Hiccup and Astrid in their dragon-scale armor on the spiny back of Hookfang, a kerosene-spewing “Stoker” dragon who defends you from a harrowing attack by the venomous, scorpion-like Deathgrippers. “The first time you see all the colors, it’s a goosebumps-type experience,” says Katie Finnegan, chief executive officer of Spatial&. “It’s one thing when you see it on the large screen, but another when it’s a 360-degree experience. It’s a truly magical moment.”

The breathless journey ends with a panoramic view of the Hidden World, with its circling packs of flying dragons with wings outstretched; it’s glittering, bioluminescent stalactites and swarm of golden baby dragon hatchlings.

The How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World virtual tour is happening now in parking lots of Walmart stores in 16 cities, rounding out in Bentonville, Arkansas, on April 9. HP has a longstanding partnership with DreamWorks, and HP technology has been used by the animators who created all three of the How to Train Your Dragon films. HP and Intel are not only the technology partners for the tour, but also are the biggest sellers of PCs at Walmart. While waiting in line, HP invites fans to “game like a dragon” with Intel-based OMEN by HP gaming laptops outside the main attraction.

“This project was an opportunity for HP to work with two great partners and bring to life something that hasn’t been done before,” says Joanna Popper, head of location-based VR entertainment for HP. “It enables audiences who have loved these stories and these characters to be part of the movie, and to have that full immersion and interactivity that VR brings like no other medium.”

The story arc riffs off of a central theme of the How to Train Your Dragon universe: The bond between dragon and rider. The aim of VR experiences like this are to keep people returning to brick-and-mortar stores through VR and tech-driven storytelling, Finnegan explains, something Walmart is betting will drive sales.

“We created custom art ourselves with the guidance of the producers of the movie to help us render this environment in a way that wasn’t possible before,” Finnegan says. From the dragons’ flight patterns to the animated gestures of viking hero Hiccup, the VR experience aims to “create a heightened relationship with our customers,” she explains. “We invite people to shop at the height of their emotional connection with the story, and hopefully, they will want to bring part of that experience home.”

Judging by the line of fans snaking around the tent on a recent Friday — and the $430 million the film has netted to date — many customers did take a piece of the movie home with them.

“We had a kid come through three times, even when the wait was an hour plus,” Finnegan says. “He emerged with a look of sheer joy.”

Read about the amazing HP technology behind the magic of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.