The first concept I explored was digital twin prototypes with a focus on two areas: how quickly could we produce the prototypes and what benefits they could add to our creative process.

For a start at gathering data to address those two areas, I created a digital twin for a past GMR project to get an idea of how we could rapidly build VR prototypes, the skills required, and rough ranges of time requirements.

As for benefits of rapid VR prototyping, I had potential users review videos, a slide deck, and the VR prototype I built, then I asked questions and collected their feedback about how VR prototypes might fit into their workflow.

The results were that most stakeholders saw a lot of value in using VR to simulate architectural designs, physical structures, and guest interactions for evaluating experiential installations. But also a lot of concern over the cost-benefit ratio due to the headcount, time, and effort needed to build highly interactive digital twins in VR.

The digital twin prototype exploration was about VR apps that are fully interactive: the gameplay environment is real-time 3D objects, and many of the objects in the scene can be interacted with--can grab and manipulate objects and run into walls, etc.

That kind of fully interactive app can take some time to develop and might not be the best solution for a user who only wants to view a complex 3D scene in VR. For the latter, it might not be possible to recreate the lighting and object materials for lower performance VR platforms.

So, for this situation where a user might only want to "walk-though" a detailed 3D scene, I explored the process and benefits of exporting 360 images from a 3D modeling app (Blender in this case) and dropping them into Unity where they can be added to a VR app and deployed as a walk-through experience.

The main two steps are (1) building the 3D model or producing the 360 images and (2) adding them to a Unity project where a user can cycle through the images and have the perception of walking through the scene.

An impromptu task that was added to this project was to put together some basic VR interaction design info for our lead UX designer and other team members. My creative director wanted something to help give the team more inside knowledge about how VR apps are designed and some of the fundamental decisions you have to make when developing a VR experience.