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If you are completely new to this area, then we would like to take a little of your time to explain what ‘Web Based Virtual Experiences’ are and how you can best use them to increase client and customer engagement.

In short, ‘Web Based Virtual Experiences’ are designed to help agencies, brands and enterprise clients take their marketing and sales to the next level of immersion and engagement by creating a cloud hosted interactive portal incorporating virtual spaces or environments. These virtual spaces or environments can then be used to immerse and connect your audience with your brand, services, or products.

So, to expand on that a little, this type of media enables you to make completely digital versions of your product, service or even your brand story which your clients or customers can interact with, either in real time Interactive 3d or gamification, and all accessed through your browser window (a bit like being inside a computer game or ‘Metaverse’ launched through your desktop rather than through a ‘HMD’ Head mounted device).

Whilst the most obvious benefit, over the last 18 months, has been helping the retail and events-based industries to stay active whilst physical gatherings are still restricted, these experiences also allow the commercial and enterprise sectors to:

• provide innovative ways to train their employees and partners where its either too dangerous to practice or difficult to get people to the training event, and,

• Offer a collaborative way to present new products and services, in real time interactive 3d, to global teams and allowing them to review and feedback all from the comfort of their own office and time zone

What is extremely exciting about using these ‘Web Based Virtual Experiences’ is that it gives you the opportunity to create whatever you can imagine, with unlimited types of interactivity and connectivity by enabling the user to interact with and navigate through a fully immersive experience.

Our Web Hosted Virtual Experiences are created using bespoke 360 pre-rendered or real-time interactive 3D environments, images and animations, data visualization, pop up graphics, custom API integrations, live video feeds and interactive 3D models. You can also connect your third party API’S like Zoom, You-Tube live feeds and Salesforce dashboards, to build not only an amazing front end experience for your client or customers but also a clever backend dashboard where your internal sales and marketing teams can access and measure your audience preferences and customer engagement, all from one cloud hosted system.

SO, WHAT HAPPENED TO MAKE THINGS GO VIRTUAL ?

As the world was forced to pivot into the idea of virtualisation in 2020, this sent ripples across, pretty much, every industry, forcing many of the tech giants to ‘up their game’ and provide the technology that allowed businesses to go digital and to resume business as normal, well a ‘new normal’.

However, after almost two years of restricted movement and gatherings, things still have not completely returned to normal, which has generated a new acceptance of doing things in a virtual online way (well it was better than doing nothing at all with a forced existence of watching Netflix 24/7).

This prompted forward thinking brands and agencies to discover new ways to ‘wake their businesses up’ and take their products, services, and events online in more innovative, engaging, and interactive ways than they had ever thought of before.

Suddenly, all their audience was effectively now in the ‘front Row’ and comprised of an increasingly more tech savvy consumer who wanted to be entertained and engaged even though they were and still partially are stuck indoors…. hence this is where this next evolution of the ‘web based virtual experience’ was born.

Now this was not an opportunity identified exclusively by the event and entertainment-based industries. High Street retail, which was already in decline year on year, noticed an opportunity to inject new life into the experience of selling their goods, providing the opportunity to sell, connect and engage with their potential customers in ways never perceived before, all at the same time, under one unique platform, embracing a new generation of shoppers who previously used to browse instore (less so now) or purchase online (where they could check reviews, get validation and competitive pricing). So why not create a virtual version of your traditional store or concession, where you can direct your audience to certain key marketing content, brand authority, offers and benefits from the comfort of their own home.

Over the coming months we intend to dive deeper into this technology and explain a bit more on how you can use ‘web hosted virtual experience platforms’ for you or your client business. We invite you to follow us on a journey where we will explore and share with you the latest innovations in this field, along with the projects that we are actively working on for our clients who have found the confidence to make the leap and go ‘Phygital’ understanding that we are intrinsically now connected to our devices.

It is important to add that we are not suggesting that these types of experiences are going to completely replace live events or physical retail, they are there to support and extend their existing physical experiences, allowing our clients to dip their toe into what the future could look like.

As we naturally evolve with the technological advancements in virtualisation and how consumers interact more remotely with brands, products, and services they are loyal too, businesses can extend their reach, enabling them to run events for longer and attract people from anywhere in the world in any time-zone.