Bogotá was changing the way it moved. A new integrated transit system arrived all at once, with new cards, new seats, new courtesies, and new routes, and a whole city had to learn the whole thing at the same time. The lessons reached people through a friendly blue character built inside a three-dimensional virtual world. His name was Pilo, and more than a decade later he is still the most watched piece on the channel.
Watch Pilo in action →The moment
The Integrated Public Transport System, the SITP, reshaped daily life for millions of people in Bogotá. Cash gave way to rechargeable smart cards. New ways to board, new seat priorities, and new route maps arrived together. A change this wide asks people to learn quickly and to learn willingly, and willing learning asks for a teacher people enjoy. The city needed a guide that riders would want to follow.
Why a character, and why a digital one
The design answered with Pilo, a virtual puppet. A character is interactive, warm, and open to everyone, from a child to an older adult, across reading levels and first languages. A digital character reaches any screen, repeats the lesson with the same patience every time, and carries the personality of an entire system in one approachable face. Pilo wore the SITP livery, its deep blue and the bright green and yellow accents of the system, so the brand and the teacher became the same friendly figure.
Inside the experience
Pilo carried several lessons at once, woven into one short journey through a virtual city.
He introduced the new way to pay. The system moved from coins and bills to rechargeable smart cards, and Pilo walked through the card colors and what each one covered, with three-dimensional models that riders could see and recognize on sight.
He modeled good conduct on the platform and inside the bus. Embedded video showed real people doing it well: holding the queue, letting riders step off first, respecting the yellow line, and offering the priority seats to those who needed them most. Seeing the behavior performed and welcomed did the teaching.
He closed with the new map. The journey ended on the routes that mattered at the time, the trunk, feeder, urban, and complementary lines that knit the city together, so a rider left the experience knowing how to pay, how to behave, and where the system could take them.
Three lessons travelled inside one friendly ride.
Built in a virtual world
Pilo lived in a fully modeled three-dimensional environment, constructed and filmed inside Second Life as machinima. The set placed him on a city street, beside a billboard that carried the skyline and the colored silhouettes of the people the system served. The choice of a virtual world gave the lesson three powers at once: a character with a face and a voice, spatial models a rider could study from any angle, and embedded footage of real conduct, all held together in a single guided scene. The result felt less like a manual and more like a walk through the system with a friend who already knew the way.
Why it still works
More than a decade after its release, Pilo remains the most watched piece on the channel and still draws new viewers every week. The durability is the point. A character people find likeable, set inside a world they can move through, ages far more slowly than a slide or a leaflet. The system it described has moved on, and people still arrive to watch, because the way it teaches still feels human.
What it transfers to any organization
This case travels well beyond one city. Any organization rolling out a new tool, a new policy, or a new system meets the same task: people must adopt it, and adopt it willingly, often quickly and at scale. An immersive, character-led rehearsal lowers the barrier. It gives the change a friendly face, lets people see the right behavior performed before they try it, and turns a list of rules into a short experience people choose to finish. The same approach that helped a city learn to ride together helps a workforce learn to work a new way.
The craft
Immersive, character-led learning design
A virtual world, a likeable guide, spatial models, and real footage, combined so that people meet a system and rehearse it before reality asks them to.
People learn a new system the day someone they like walks them through it.
If your organization needs people to adopt a new system or tool, I design immersive, character-led learning that makes them want to. Talks, workshops, and learning experience design. Remote, in dollars or euros.
My Compass Journey | Learning Architect and Psychologist 