**
**
Insight
People in Vancouver live alongside one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. They also live alongside an active oil tanker route. But because no catastrophic spill has happened yet, the risk feels abstract — a policy debate, not a visceral threat. The problem isn't that people don't care. It's that they literally can't picture it.
Problem
Proposals backed by Kinder Morgan would dramatically increase tanker traffic through Vancouver's harbour, loading nearly a million barrels of crude daily. Citizen group Dogwood Initiative needed to make the danger feel real — not in a pamphlet or a protest, but in a way that would hit people in the gut. And with municipal elections just days away, the timing was everything. The campaign needed to put oil spills on the ballot without putting a single drop in the water.
Solution
We hid an Oculus Rift headset inside a set of old-fashioned coin-operated sightseeing binoculars and installed them on the shore of English Bay — one of Vancouver's most iconic views. Unsuspecting passersby who looked through the lenses weren't met with the usual postcard panorama. Instead, they were immersed in a real-time 3D depiction of a catastrophic oil spill: a dying orca, bitumen-soaked sand, black smoke billowing from flaming pools of crude, and spill vessels scrambling to contain 500 metric tonnes leaking from a crippled tanker. The virtual scene was an enhanced replica of their actual surroundings, built in Unity 3D — the same engine used for video games. We turned their favourite view into a window onto a possible future.
Reaction
The installation became a media magnet. With Vancouver's civic election just three days away, the sitting mayor and multiple candidates showed up at the binoculars to get their soundbite on camera, each weighing in on tanker traffic and coastal protection. #NoTankers trended regionally. The campaign was covered by HuffPost, TakePart, and media outlets across Canada, driving a wave of attention to Dogwood's Local Vote 2014 platform where voters could check which candidates opposed crude oil exports through BC. The stunt reframed a policy conversation as a visceral, shareable human experience — right when it mattered most.
Behind the Scenes
This was early days for VR — Oculus hadn't even shipped a consumer product yet. We were working with dev kits, which meant constant problem-solving. The binoculars themselves had to be custom-manufactured by a props company, because vintage coin-op binoculars were both expensive and nearly impossible to modify for an Oculus headset. When we switched from the DK1 to the DK2 mid-build, we had to drill additional holes to accommodate new wiring running down to a laptop hidden in the base. And that laptop was another challenge — an Oculus demo ideally runs on a high-end desktop, not a laptop jammed into a pedestal on a beach. The VR experience was built by Vancouver game developers Adrian Crook & Associates, with our team at Rethink directing the creative and researching real spill scenarios down to specific details — like the fact that rings of burned-off oil are yellow, not orange. We set up a couple of signs warning people they might be on camera, and the "No Tankers" sticker on the binoculars did the rest — people gravitated toward it like a hashtag. Which, as it turned out, it was.
Awards: Epica Gold, Webby Award Nomination, AToMiC Award, Communication Arts