LPGA & Accenture Song
In Her Head
The LPGA is one of the premier professional athletic federations in the world and yet its players face amongst the greatest disparity in compensation and access to resources of any major sporting league.
While the vast majority of male golfers earn enough in annual endorsements to cover their full annual expenses, only the top 5% of female golfers enjoy such peace of mind. The remaining 95% rely on tour earnings to cover their costs of travel, accommodations, and golf equipment. Many athletes change caddies week to week. Some sleep on strangers’ couches before and during tournaments. Most are struggling to pay even basic living expenses. All take on these risks for the love of their sport.
To raise awareness for the unique challenges faced by LPGA athletes, Accenture Song created ‘IN HER HEAD,’ an immersive virtual and experiential installation that would debut at The Chevron Championship in April, the first women’s golf major of the season
01 THE ASK
Accenture Song tasked Early Spring to concept, design and build an immersive experiential installation that grounded and reinforced the transformative VR journey.
02 THE INSIGHT
Working in VR presents a unique challenge: Bridging users in the real world with a digital creation to create a deeper, lasting emotional impact.
03 THE SOLUTION
We designed a 3-part physical user journey employing detailed lighting design, trained, scripted actors as docents in curated golf attire and invited guests (2 at a time) to first enter a promising, overly optimistic entryway adorned with suspended clouds, elevator music and AI generated posters of inspirational messaging.
We then invite our guests into a privately draped environment inspired by the topography of golf greens using CNC fabrication using hundreds of pulsing, color-changing LED lights that set the stage for a promising experience to come…
When guests complete the headset experience, the lighting in the room has changed to better match the more profound mood and sentiment of the experience they just completed. Our docents are now more authentic, empathetic and provide a moment of decompression from the emotional experience before leading people into a final gallery exhibition that honors and celebrates the real LPGA heroes whose stores we just shared.
04 THE RESULT
Having transformed a seemingly perfect day on the course into a surreal, technicolor trip that provided room for reflection on the emotional impact of the message, ‘In Her Head’ was an official selection of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca X.