Project:

Immersive virtual tour, Outokumpu

The challenge

A steel mill is one of the hardest things in industry to explain to someone standing at a trade fair. The process is enormous, continuous, and mostly hidden inside equipment nobody can walk through. Photographs flatten it, diagrams strip out the scale, and video on a screen competes with everything else on the stand. Outokumpu needed visitors at an international energy trade fair to understand how their production process works, and to want to spend time finding out.

What was made

A five-minute VR and 360 video tour of the mill’s production process, built to be watched from inside the facility rather than from outside it. The route follows production in sequence, so the viewer arrives at each stage in the order the material does.

What it was like

Wearing the headset put visitors inside the plant. Scale is the thing a screen cannot deliver and a 360 environment can: standing next to the equipment rather than looking at a picture of it. Visitors stayed with the experience for its full length, which is not something trade fair content usually achieves.

Where it ran

Pico Neo 3 Pro headsets on the stand, with a browser-based version for anyone without a headset, and for use after the event.

Outcome

The experience drew attention and interest at the ONS22 energy trade fair in Norway, including coverage on local television. A stand attraction that earns broadcast coverage is doing more than communicating a process; it is making the company worth pointing a camera at.