Interactive Product Portfolio

At every trade show, companies struggle with the same issue: How do you use your limited space to present all that you have to offer? Luckily, Ventuz provides a fancy and efficient solution: the interactive product portfolio. A recent and quite interesting example was created by the agency mindstroem for agricultural engineering company Zuther.

The family-run business is specialized in farming machinery, such as silos, conveyor belts, sorting devices and the like. After several rounds of discussion and a handful of different menu designs, the agency tried a different approach: the final concept forgoes a menu altogether and instead introduces the product portfolio inside the 3D model of a machine house. Visitors can see where each product is used, interactively maneuver through the model, and select a product for closer inspection and additional information.

Much of the data that was handed over to mindstroem for content creation came in the form of CAD-files – an unhandy format for real-time presentations. “We needed assets that we could easily animate in Ventuz, some even just partially where drawers opened or gears rotated”, explaines Thomas Otto of mindstroem. “A lot of our preparation time went into editing the models for import into Ventuz or completely recreating them in Cinema 4D.”

Additional information was organized through an external Excel-file. “We programmed the project to allow up to twelve localizations”, says Thomas. “By simply adding the translations into the according fields in the content table, the project updates automatically and offers the added language. Upon delivery for the trade show, we had prepared German and English for Zuther.”

This feature was especially helpful for further use of the project as a tool for the sales team. Mindstroem created a downscaled version of the Ventuz project, that would run smoothly on a Microsoft Surface tablet PC. With this device at their disposal, the sales personnel can now engage and inform clients all over the world, at trade shows, roadshows or business meetings.

But this shall not be the end of Zuther’s interactive product portfolio. As an internal trial, mindstroem transformed the project into a VR experience using the Ventuz VR nodes. “Turning the scene into virtual reality was easily done in Ventuz”, says Thomas. “The user can walk through the machine house, which appears at its original size.” When the client was first shown the VR adaptation, they seemed quite impressed. Maybe this will be a showstopper at a future exhibition.