“We love what you did with the Login Lounge – can we have the same so that we can attract sponsors to our new National Energy Efficiency Centre?”
No problem we thought. Creating an engaging, interactive online experience, portraying the beauty of a REAL space is what we do.
However, it turned out that our client’s vision of the National Energy Efficiency Centre [the NEEC] was just that: a vision in a visionary’s head, and was currently 17,000 square feet of dusty, newly constructed and completely empty space.
So, how to create this vision of the future?
Uniquely, we believe.
Our central challenge was that this wasn’t simply an exercise in choosing between pure 3D photorealistic modelling, virtual staging, a digital twin creation or a virtual tour production, as each failed to deliver a complete solution that met our client’s brief.
Why?
- Photo-realism was a core requirement to attract sponsors. Whilst we could produce a pure 3D model, the restricted graphics processing power of the average mobile device or desktop computer would severely limit the amount of real time raytracing that could be performed and would therefore significantly compromise photo-realism. Raytracing is the computationally intensive process that adds shadows and reflections, critical to photorealism. Adding the additional media-rich ‘Living Vista Experience™’ elements such as Presenters, would have placed an additional burden on the computing platform – the virtual NEEC tour would have simply ground to a halt! We needed to create something beyond just a 3D model to achieve the required real time photo-realism.
- Virtual staging is a well-established technique incorporated into virtual tours, often used in real estate tours to virtually dress and re-dress an otherwise bare-looking room. This works well when there are a limited number of low complexity items, such as pieces of furniture, in small spaces with finished walls and a ceiling. Our brief however, was not only to drop in standard 3D assets such as an air source heat pump, an Electric Vehicle and solar PV panels on the virtual house [!] but also to create multiple custom models of the key components of the NEEC, like the roofing rigs in which ceiling, flooring and roof insulation training would be given. This complexity, in a very large, partially built space with multiple light sources, went beyond the realms of regular virtual staging. We first needed to build the stage into which we could then add the models.
- Highly detailed Digital Twins can result in wonderfully photo-realistic ‘fly through’ 3D environments. However, with large spaces and highly detailed modelling comes an associated ‘movie set’ budget! Aside from the prohibitive cost, to realistically render this scale of environment in real time across such a large space, requires very high-end processing power. But this project required a photo-realistic and outstanding user experience to be delivered across all types of standard computing devices, especially over a mobile network to a mobile phone of average performance. So again, another method was required.
- Standard interactive Virtual Tour technology is now well established, but of course it’s about turning an existing space into a virtual space that can be explored and deliver information in various forms. In this project, we were starting with only a shell, and a partial one at that!
So what was needed was a perfect blend of all 4 disciplines, whilst at the same time incorporating the key differentiator of our core Living Vista Experience™ virtual tour – the embedding of Presenters to engage with visitors in a highly personalised manner.
Our unique solution
We created our very first Virtual Living Vista Experience™, where we seamlessly blended the incomplete real space with a virtual representation of the future space.
Together they create a composite stage into which 3D models of the training rigs, classrooms and more could be placed or ‘staged’. It was this composite stage that could then be photo-realistically rendered in 360° from multiple specific locations within the floor space of the NEEC.
Using our ’secret sauce’ ‘real space – virtual space’ blending technique coupled with in360’s high fidelity chromakey process, we placed Presenters inside the composite model to interactively and personally engage with visitors, offering information about the various elements in a friendly and familiar form.
Embedding InfoSpots of text, imagery and video, amplified the story telling, and a user interface menu structure overlaid on the entire stage aided navigation and provided further knowledge.
And the cherry on the cake – a state-of-the-art AI Expert Agent avatar, offering conversational voice interaction on the subject of the NEEC, enhancing the personalised engagement experience, fitting in well with the real Presenters.
The outcome – A time-machine transporting the visitor to the NEEC of sometime later this year, enabling prospective sponsors and collaborators to be inspired by and buy into the vision of our client. Presented at the Installer Show at the NEC in June 2024, our client let us know that ‘the virtual tour of the National Energy Efficiency Centre went down a storm with both sponsors and companies’.
Click here to visit the NEEC LVX
