As young at heart as I like to think I am, I’m at an age where I see a lot of products targeted to younger or older people than me. If I find the pitch confusing or unappealing, my wife and I conclude figure that I’m not in the demographic to which the ad is meant to appeal. It could be that the ad is bad, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Unfortunately, I find myself not in the demo a lot these days.
Millions of Us has created a set of Scion City regions for Toyota’s Scion car brand, and I’m not in the demo. It’s certainly nicely done, if you like a bleak, urban landscape surrounding a Scion showroom. The showroom itself is nicely done, showing off the three Scion models to nice effect. The display units are always changing color, though, so they are constantly blurring as the textures rez.
One downside: They want to you pay L$300 for each of these cars. No freebies here. To their credit, they do come wih a HUD that allows you to select different colors and wheels from presets. More importantly, you are allowed and encouraged to extract and modify the textures, creating your own custom ride. Along the way I met a “Sciontiist” (what, no Sciontologist?) who did just that. He would do the same for me, for a price, of course.
Near the showroom was a gallery of more extensive modifications people had done to their cars. There’s a nice connection to a community of builders and modders here, though over the month that I’ve peeked into the Scion City regions the gallery has been pretty static.
The most unusual thing about Scion City is how open-ended it is. Very little of the city is dedicated to Scion vehicles. Much of it is retail space around which you can drive (although most of the retail space is empty, you can see that they hope to expand). Along the way I found a dance club and a skate park. The surprising thing is that the area hasn’t attracted some of the more popular vendors that would fit well in this gritty, urban landscape — FORM and Renegade come to mind. Maybe the area is intended to give the small fry a chance?
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Scion%20City/86/63/23
