Project Type
Sales & Marketing Virtual Reality (VR)
Location
Private / Global
Designers
Private
Shipyard
Private
Deliverables
Untethered VR Experience
Implementation
Marketing Suites & Events
‘The Beach Club’ is a 500m² superyacht beach club concept, developed as an immersive untethered VR experience.
Created with sales suites and exhibition environments in mind, the experience is designed to communicate both the intimacy of the space and its overall scale. A narrated walkthrough takes the user through the space from day to night, highlighting key features, layout configurations and the relationship between the different areas.
A selection of stills and headset recordings from the experience show how VR can be used to communicate spatial design in detail, while giving clients and project teams a more immediate understanding of the proposed environment.
As well as a seated experience, users can either teleport between areas or walk freely through the entire space, depending on the requirements of the presentation. Features including multi-user integration, first- and third-person perspectives through a companion app, and remote headset management allow teams to experience and review the space collaboratively.
A design team or owner’s representative, for example, can walk through the interior with the end client to review the design, discuss materials or simply check whether the sunset is visible from a particular seat around the firepit. By allowing users to experience a space at real-world scale, VR provides a level of spatial understanding that can be difficult to achieve through more traditional visualisation methods.
We looked to capture moments of life throughout key areas of the Beach Club, giving users a sense of how the space could be enjoyed and used. In the seated experience, the narration builds on this by highlighting different aspects of the lifestyle and the opportunities within the design. As the experience transitions from day to night, details such as the food and drink also change, adding another layer of interaction and helping bring the environment to life.
To explore the potential of free-walking VR at a larger scale, we hired an airport hangar at Farnborough International and printed the entire Beach Club floorplan at full scale, with support from Lavastar. This allowed the design team to physically walk through the proposed space with the owner and their representatives, discussing specific design points and identifying changes for the next round of revisions.
Experiencing the design at full scale can make these discussions far more immediate than working through plans or successive image updates, allowing decisions to be made collaboratively and with a clearer understanding of the space.
The same approach can be scaled considerably further. Our current record for a single free-walking VR experience is 20,000m².
