After a decade of pioneering work in 3D, we are now positioned to guide businesses through a critical transition. We are moving from flat 2D communication to the immersive and interactive experiences that the modern market now demands.
From the Metaverse rush to hybrid reality:
To understand the current demands, it is important that we look a couple of years back first to comprehend where the trends are heading. During the pandemic, we were impacted by a heavy shift. The market moved from both flat 2D and physical XR experiences, like VR and AR being used for events, to fully digital immersive experiences. Clients dove headfirst toward virtual showrooms and metaverse experiences online in search of a way to replace the extinguished physical events.
This led to a boom of immersive online experiences in the B2B and B2C markets. However, due to a lack of knowledge with this new interactive medium, it tended to become a flat experience that wouldn’t endure much longer outside of the niched gamer communities.
In the last couple of post-pandemic years, the understanding of the technology has matured. A lot of the artificially pumped hype has passed, and what remains are the solutions that proved to have a good ROI and adoption rates. This shows that the scale isn’t anymore tipping between the two extremes of either only physical or fully virtual reality communication. It has settled somewhere in between, through a hybrid format.
Accessibility over hardware:
We understood and believed in that transformation. So, for the past one and a half years, we have been shifting our processes to be less hardware-locked. We are instead more focused on the accessibility and reusability of the digital content. We enable interactive product presentations that can be seen or shared on a web browser, and at the same time, transported for different mediums such as VR, social media, and even sales brochures.
This breakthrough has been proving to us and our clients that interactive digital content production is more worth the investment. It saves costs for the whole communication ecosystem of any sized company when compared to more traditional approaches. This is clearly a big advantage that removes the barrier for enterprise-scale adoptions. Solving real business challenges now that the dust has settled with the interactive 3D experiences boom, decision-makers are looking beyond the hype and looking for solutions that can prove a ROI. We are addressing this by focusing on a practical and human-centered approach. We help our clients to understand how the content we make can be reused in different fronts of their communication needs.
Most especially, we show how it can help to give their own team more autonomy to personalize their communication content for their customers. We are also looking closely at our clients business models. We create solutions that can be scaled according to their conditions, so that the solution by itself can be a catalyst for growth. This happens either by boosting their sales or improving internal communication processes along the way.
The Smartscape® methodology:
Our approach consists of many times helping the client get started with this interactive communication transformation with content that they already have. This can be a sales brochure, audiovisual material, or even 3D technical CAD files. By leveraging this content, we can create a richer and accessible interactive content library, which allows the use of a digital experience and its communications sub-products, like 3D files, videos, and images, across any channel.
What makes interactive communication special is that you can personalize your customer experience and give them understandable bites of information for the most complex B2B and industrial processes. This approach makes the same digital content also a viable solution for engaging and memorable customer experiences. Due to its highly adaptable and personalized nature, it can be made also into an internal communication solution for onboarding and training.
Success Stories in Heavy Industry:
We have seen this approach deliver incredible results for our partners. With Outokumpufor example, we made a virtual reality tour of their steel mill facilities to help them better communicate about their technology and processes to their customers, and also to their own team.
Sample of Outokumpu’s 360° virtual tour
The tour used a combination of real-life 360 video footage of the mills and 3D generated footage. This allowed us to take the camera inside the blasting furnaces and other impossible hazardous places. This experience gave Outokumpua top-tier sales material that could awe and convince their prospects of their services. It increased their lead generation and even led to TV coverage.
Another more recent case is the interactive presentation tool made for MAILLEFER. We presented a highly complex manufacturing process in an easy to understand and accessible manner.
We worked together with their marketing and sales teams to not only create an interactive visualization of many of their solutions in a production line, but also digest their technical and complex sales brochures. We turned them into an interactive multi-layered presentation format that can make the most complex process understandable both to newcomers, all the way up to the most senior engineers who can be familiar with the most advanced technical aspects of it.
This whole multi-layered, interactive, and personalized content is the essence of Smart Product Communication. We bring this concept to life through Smartscape®, which is our internal method for the creation of smart communication solutions for our customers.
A more in-depth look at our collaboration with Maillefer
Our Commitment and Future: Our distinct advantage comes from a combination of our decade-long experience in pioneering interactive and reusable 3D solutions, and the desire to embark on the digital transformation journey with our customers. For us, succeeding together with our customers is our long-term commitment with them. We do that by working closely together in the development of their business model.
This approach sets us apart from other 3D and XR providers who are usually stuck on a one-time project relationship. Looking ahead, our future is focused on two fronts. We are planning strategic global expansion into key markets like Brazil, and we are enhancing our core platform to give clients even more autonomy in creating and deploying their own interactive experiences.
Digital and interactive media are paving their way to become the new pillar of B2B communication. Just as companies nowadays have their own website and communication professionals in-house, we believe that Smart Product Communication will go through the same evolution. We want to be there to help our clients embrace this new era of digital communication and expand beyond it.
Jonathan Biz Medina is the COO of Stereoscape, with over 10 years of experience coordinating interactive projects for clients from different industries internationally.
