PlayStation's Feel A New Real campaign, created by adam&eveDDB in 2023, launches PS VR2 in the United States through a first-person film built around a rising
PlayStation Feel A New Real Brings PS VR2 to Life
PlayStation's Feel A New Real is a 2023 launch campaign for PlayStation VR2, created by adam&eveDDB and published in the United States in November 2023, designed to communicate the emotional and sensory depth of the PS VR2 headset through a single first-person film rather than a product demonstration.
Sony Interactive Entertainment commissioned the campaign to mark the broader creative push surrounding the PlayStation VR2 launch, which had taken place on February 22, 2023, at a retail price of $549.99 in the United States, as confirmed by Sony's own product pages. The central film follows a protagonist through a sequence of escalating scenarios — the cockpit of a spacecraft under attack, a crash-landing in a mysterious village, pursuit by hostile locals, and a fall through a well onto the back of a Tallneck in a world drawn from the PlayStation VR2 title Horizon Call of the Mountain. Every scene is rendered from the protagonist's point of view, collapsing the distance between viewer and player. As tension builds, the protagonist's heartbeat appears as both sound and on-screen graphic, giving the audience a physiological measure of immersion rather than a verbal one.
The campaign's objective in the United States is clear and deliberate: to reframe PS VR2 not as a peripheral accessory but as a transformative gaming platform. The Clapboard Score for Feel A New Real is 73 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and strategic coherence against a competitive and skeptical market for premium VR hardware. The film medium was the sole asset in the campaign's documented release, concentrating the brand's entire argument for PlayStation VR2 games into one unbroken, visceral ride.
Sony Interactive Entertainment launched PS VR2 into a United States market shaped by significant headwinds. Global extended-reality headset shipments declined year over year in the first quarter of 2023, according to reporting by TechWire Asia, signalling that consumer enthusiasm for VR hardware was far from guaranteed. Against that backdrop, the strategic imperative for Feel A New Real was not to celebrate the technology's existence but to justify its premium price point emotionally.
The competitive pressure was substantial. Meta Quest held an estimated 49% of global extended-reality headset shipments in the first quarter of 2023, according to Custom Market Insights, and separate analysis cited by Mixed News placed Meta's overall VR market share at approximately 85% in early 2023, with Sony not yet ranked among the top five VR providers globally. In the United States, where PlayStation has strong brand equity among console gamers, adam&eveDDB's strategic answer was to shift the conversation away from hardware comparison entirely. Rather than contest Meta Quest or other competitors on specification or price, the campaign competed on a register those rivals had not claimed: the feeling of being physically present inside PlayStation VR2 games.
The insight driving Feel A New Real is that immersion cannot be described — it must be demonstrated physiologically. By anchoring the film to a rising heartbeat, adam&eveDDB gave United States audiences a metric they already understood from lived experience: the body's involuntary response to fear, excitement, and wonder. The VR gaming market was estimated at a meaningful scale in 2023 across multiple research sources, including GM Insights and Grand View Research, with gaming representing a substantial segment of the broader immersive technology market. Within that expanding but contested landscape, PlayStation VR2 needed a campaign that elevated the brand conversation beyond hardware and into human sensation. Feel A New Real delivered that argument in a single, uninterrupted film.
Henry Hobson directed Feel A New Real for production company MJZ. Hobson's directorial approach leans into cinematic restraint, allowing the point-of-view structure to carry the emotional weight rather than relying on conventional advertising devices. The choice to lock the camera to the protagonist's perspective throughout the entire film is not a gimmick — it is the creative idea itself, because the immersive logic of PS VR2 and the immersive logic of the film are identical.
Director of photography Mauro Chiarello shot the film, with production designer Jonathan Houlding responsible for the environments through which the protagonist travels. The sequence of worlds — spacecraft cockpit, crashed village, hostile pursuit, and the Horizon Call of the Mountain Tallneck — required each visual environment to feel credibly dangerous within seconds of appearing on screen, sustaining the heartbeat escalation that structures the film's emotional arc. Lucy Jones served as executive producer and head of production at MJZ, with James Waters as producer. Editor Stewart Reeves at Work Editorial assembled the sequence, with editorial producer Frankie Elster and edit assistant Rain Keene supporting the cut. Sam Ashwell handled sound design and mix, a role that carried unusual creative weight in this particular film: the heartbeat is both a sonic event and a narrative device, and its timing against the on-screen graphic required precision to feel physiologically authentic rather than illustrative. Audio producers Olivia Ray and Carla Thomas completed the sound team. Adaptation production was handled by Cain&Abel. All production credits are documented by LBBOnline in their April 2025 coverage of the campaign.
Campaign magazine, writing on 29 November 2023, described the film as an immersive 30-second piece promoting PlayStation VR2, with the point-of-view construction and the heartbeat mechanism cited as the defining formal choices. Creative Salon, in their year-end 2023 review, identified Feel A New Real as one of adam&eveDDB's most impressive global PlayStation campaigns of the year — a line of work that, according to Creative Salon, stretches back at least to the agency's 2019 PS Now campaign and includes the landmark Play Has No Limits PS5 launch in 2020.
Feel A New Real generated documented audience engagement on PlayStation's own YouTube channel. According to figures reported by the platform and cited by Clapboard's archive, the campaign film recorded approximately 289,915 views, 2,210 likes, and 420 comments. These figures represent organic audience interaction with a single-asset campaign built around one thirty-second film — a format that concentrates engagement rather than distributes it across multiple executions.
In the broader hardware context, Sony reported 600,000 PS VR2 units sold in the first six weeks following the February 2023 launch, as reported by Video Games Chronicle. A separate projection from IDC, cited by Mixed News, estimated approximately 270,000 PS VR2 units sold from launch through the end of March 2023. The divergence between these two figures reflects different methodological approaches — Sony's figure is cumulative across a longer window — and neither can be attributed solely to the effect of the Feel A New Real campaign, which published in November 2023, several months after the initial launch period. The campaign's role was therefore one of sustained cultural positioning rather than launch-week conversion, reinforcing PlayStation VR2 games as a living platform for United States audiences entering the holiday purchasing window.
Adsoftheworld and the Clio Network both documented the campaign formally, with the Clio Network entry identifying Sony Interactive Entertainment as client and adam&eveDDB as agency for the United States market, according to their respective archives. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects the campaign's disciplined use of a single creative device — the rising heartbeat — executed with genuine production craft across a challenging immersive brief.
Feel A New Real is a 2023 PlayStation VR2 campaign created by adam&eveDDB for Sony Interactive Entertainment. Published in the United States in November 2023, it uses a single first-person film to communicate PS VR2 immersion through a protagonist's rising heartbeat, rendered as both sound and on-screen graphic across escalating game environments.
Henry Hobson directed Feel A New Real for production company MJZ. Director of photography Mauro Chiarello shot the film, with editor Stewart Reeves at Work Editorial cutting the final piece. Sound design and mix were handled by Sam Ashwell, whose work on the heartbeat mechanism was central to the campaign's emotional effect.
PlayStation VR2 launched in the United States on February 22, 2023, at a retail price of $549.99, as confirmed by Sony. Feel A New Real, the adam&eveDDB campaign built around the headset, published in November 2023, positioning PS VR2 games for United States audiences during the holiday period.
Meta Quest held an estimated 49% of global extended-reality headset shipments in the first quarter of 2023, according to Custom Market Insights. Feel A New Real did not compete on specification, instead positioning PlayStation VR2 through physical sensation and emotion — a strategic register that differentiated PS VR2 from Meta Quest's broader consumer positioning.
Feel A New Real earned a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative craft in its use of a single sustained device — the rising heartbeat — executed across a demanding first-person film format, balanced against the structural challenge of marketing premium PS VR2 hardware into a declining VR headset market.
Horizon Call of the Mountain is the PlayStation VR2 game explicitly represented in Feel A New Real, appearing in the film's final sequence as the protagonist lands on the back of a Tallneck. The campaign also moves through a spacecraft cockpit and a mysterious village, environments designed to demonstrate the breadth of PlayStation VR2 games and immersive experiences.
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