Well, yes. But it’s not what you think. Welcome to the world of viral marketing.
The crop circle was designed by flesh and blood human beings: NVIDIA and a collection of crop circle artists to be exact. The marketing stunt was produced to promote the new Tegra K1 processor for phones and tablets.
The impressive processors have the same architecture as many super computers and the same parallel computing platform that is used to study interstellar particles. The card can also power an impressive GeForce graphics card while using a small amount of power.
For such an impressive phone chip, NVIDIA wanted an out of this world marketing campaign. Their answer was the viral marketing campaign “Project 192” in the form of the aforementioned crop circle. The number 192, which is spelled out in Braille in the design, references the graphics cores within the new chip.
The campaign worked. Newsrooms around the world, from Hungry to Mongolia, reported on the new crop design. The circles even made appearances on CNN, Yahoo, and local news channels. Possible explanations ranged from aliens to government conspiracies. However, a few figured out the truth before NVIDIA came forward in early January. The beauty of such a campaign is that those few who figured it out were likely the very engineers and technophiles that NVIDIA wanted to reach.
This media stunt falls into a long line of viral campaign programs which have exploded in the new technological age. Perhaps most famous include the “Old Spice” commercials, and Alternate reality games (ARG’s) “I love Bees” used to promote the release of Halo 2 in 2004, and “The Dark Knights’” “I believe in Harvey Dent/Why So Serious” campaigns.
Source NVIDIA