Development and Use of 360 VR for Business Presentations

Improvement of Public Perception of Industrial Activities

In the modern interconnected, over-populated, and over-polluted world, licence to operate is becoming a challenge for industrial companies regardless of where they work and what they do. As perception is considered a reality, companies need to employ new technologies to present a more transparent, engaging, and realistic narrative which can be understood not just by selected groups of experts but also by wider audiences.

Surprisingly, even the most progressive and technologically advanced companies limit their presentations to basic tools such as PowerPoint, PDF or Prezi. Despite their convenience and negligible costs, these tools have limited possibilities for visualisation. They are primarily designed for conveying information and offer zero interaction. The longer and more complex the presentation, the harder it is to understand.

Conditioned by evolution, our brain is hotwired to study the surrounding world by looking at the three-dimensional objects placed in the three-dimensional environment. We better understand things when we can see, hear, and interact with them.

Our 20+ years of experience in organising online and offline events shows that with the information overload, the quality of its absorption and interpretation are changing. To capture the audience’s attention and imagination, it is no longer enough to show slides and a “talking heads”, like we are doing now. Viewers expect more action, more visualisation, more interactivity.

Creating a fact-based perception of a modern industrial enterprise is not an easy task. To form even the most superficial idea of what a plant or mine looks like and does, one needs to see them in person. Otherwise, they will remain an abstract vision, prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. In other words, we can trust what we can see with our own eyes.

Even before the spread of coronavirus infection, receiving visitors without disrupting operations and using extra resources, has been a challenging task. In the current environment with travel restrictions, health, and safety issues, organising physical meetings and visits to industrial enterprises is even more difficult.

So, is it possible to organise presentations and visits to companies remotely? The good news is thanks to VR and AI technologies, companies can now host an unlimited number of visits, presentations and training sessions using virtual twins created in a 3D immersive environment. The other good news is that the development of a virtual twin of a company is not that hard, and the process is very similar to building a website. This makes it affordable and accessible to almost any business. So, if your company has a corporate website, creating and maintaining its virtual 3D twin will be fairly straightforward.

What is the Virtual Twin?

We develop virtual immersive presentations and virtual twins to address communication, marketing, or educational objectives. We use 360 ° panoramic photos and videos of real sites and objects to create an immersive environment. If necessary, cloud-based 3D and BIM models can add to the presentations making them highly practical for day-to-day operations.

Virtual twins are modeled in a three-dimensional environment, enabling users to move around spaces and interact with presented objects. This is how 3D games are designed using computer graphics and animations. Although highly immersive and interactive, gaming technologies are less suitable for creating virtual twins, as our objective is to visualise the real objects and not fictional computer models. Moreover, a computer or BIM model often takes days and sometimes weeks to design while 360°panorama can be shot almost instantly and takes under one hour to process and edit. If required, Cloud-Based Building Information Models and 3D rendered objects can be integrated into virtual twins.

Virtual twins created with 360°panoramas have pre-configured players which can be easily integrated into websites and do not require additional downloads. This makes them very accessible. Some corporate networks and strict firewalls can block the virtual twin.  That is when we are using TURN (Transversal Using Relays around NAT) servers to relay the communication and establish the connection. TURN detects those viewers who have difficulties connecting through the free version and connects them through a relay server. It’s like insurance that only jumps in when there’s a problem.

If you think that the use of VR for the representation of real-life objects is a novel concept and needs more time to become widely accepted, think again.  While many believe that virtual and mixed reality is a modern invention, this is not the case. The first known examples of virtual reality representations date back to the first century BC. Panoramic murals of landscapes and buildings have been discovered during excavations of ancient Pompeii.  The first use of virtual panoramas for public presentations is associated with the English artist Robert Barker, who built an attraction in 1787 to demonstrate a spherical painting of London.  The history of using digital imaging for virtual reality commences in the early 1950s. The first immersive cinema was created by Morton Heilig in 1962. In 1980, the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) designed a simulator of a war game called “Simulation Networking” or SIMNET. The evolution of this game has allowed hundreds of soldiers to sit in simulators of tanks, helicopters, and bombers to test their fighting skills between them, much like in a very realistic video game. The mass scale use of VR began in 1991 with the advent of the SEGA VR helmet. But the real revolution in the development of 3D virtual presentations came after the 360° images appeared on Google maps in 2007, and when Facebook launched a virtual platform for the Oculus gaming helmet in 2016.

Virtual 3D twins are best viewed with VR headsets and computer screens and can be integrated into websites. They can also be presented without internet on TV panels at the exhibition stand, in the office reception, or used for conference on-screen presentations. Virtual 3D twins can be used for many different purposes. Here are just a few more examples.