A trio of northwest based tech marketers teamed up to bring a disruptive experience to the construction industry’s exhibition environment with an augmented reality experience this month.
Kingspan Industrial Insulation UK, leader in premium performance insulation products for HVAC and building services applications were looking for an innovative way of attracting people to their stand at CIBSE’s Build2Perform Live at Olympia this month. Claire Rigg, Marketing Manager said ‘competing for people’s attention and differentiating yourself from the competition in this environment is really tricky. We didn’t want to just spend money on the usual promotional merchandise giveaways. We wanted to offer something that positioned as technologically in the lead as a company, and that brought our products to life – and augmented reality seemed the ideal option.
We were, as always, excited to take up the challenge at Eclipse. Working with Manchester based AR and 3D modeling specialist Milenne Tanganelli we came up with the idea of displaying Kingspan’s Kooltherm Pipe Insulation and KoolDuct System in augmented reality via mobile devices (iPad and mobile phone) to increase engagement at the stand.
The virtual pipe and duct insulation systems will appear as a 3D model on graphics panels each side giving the illusion that it is real and attached to it. Milenne said ‘It’s really important that due to the size of the panel and the 3D model, we needed to first simulate the user experience around the stand in order to understand the flow of the experience in the space available.
Since we have a large panel and 3D model, we have used ‘Extended Tracking’ for the stand. By using ‘Extended Tracking’, only the initial scanning of the experience would require you to place the whole of the target image within the camera view thus overcoming any issues with space.
Once the experience loads and is activated against the target image, the user can then walk around and face their camera away from the image as it is now tracked to a position relative to the world.’
The experience was built using Zapworks and delivered via the Zappar app. Nikki Hilton, Digital Strategy Manager at Eclipse managed the project and was impressed with the results during its debut outing at the earlier Manchester Healthcare Estates 2019 exhibition. ‘The client wanted a soft launch of the technology prior to their big show in November. Over the 2 days there were 144 ‘Zaps’ whereby people interacted with the augmented reality experience, and feedback from users was hugely positive.
I have absolutely loved working with these guys on this project – and it’s fair to say women in tech marketing is a massive force to be reckoned with.’
