2017 Kia Sorento | Surround View Monitoring “Rubber Duckies” Test

Kia’s 2017 “Rubber Duckies” commercial tests the Sorento’s Surround View Monitoring system, directed by Filip Nilsson for SKUNK. Produced with visual effects by The Mill, the spot demonstrates the Sorento’s camera technology inside a stark, stylized testing environment built from a real-world location.

SCANable captured 3D LiDAR scans of the Pomona Fairplex Building set in Pomona, California, and created the white 3D environment model seen throughout the advertisement. The retopologized model and point-cloud data gave The Mill accurate geometry for camera tracking, set extension and CG integration across the spot.

Measurement beats reconstruction from photographs

There are two ways to arrive at a model of a space. One is to measure it. The other is to look at photographs of it and build something that matches them.

The second approach produces geometry that is correct from the reference angles and progressively wrong everywhere else. Perspective distortion in the source images gets baked in as shape, and the errors are invisible until a camera moves somewhere the photographer never stood.

Terrestrial laser scanning removes the interpretation step entirely. Every surface is sampled at a known distance and a known angle, so the model is a record rather than an argument. That is the foundation of our set and location scanning, and it is the reason measured environments survive camera work that reconstructed ones cannot.

A demonstration spot has to be dimensionally honest

Advertising that shows a product doing something specific carries a different obligation from advertising that sells a feeling. When a spot demonstrates how a camera system perceives the space around a vehicle, the space has to be believable as a physical arrangement.

Distances between objects, clearance around the car, the geometry of the surrounding floor — all of it is effectively part of the claim being made. Geometry taken from the real location keeps those relationships intact without anyone needing to think about them.

Complete in every direction

Environments built for a single hero angle are common and cheap. They are also useless the moment a shot circles the subject.

A capture that covers a space from many positions produces geometry with no preferred viewpoint. Surfaces exist behind the camera as well as in front of it, corners are resolved rather than implied, and the model supports a reflection or a reverse angle without anybody scrambling to build the missing half.

Completeness at capture costs a few extra setups. Rebuilding a missing wall in post costs considerably more, and never matches. The finished environment is delivered through retopology and render-ready builds at real-world scale.

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