Presenting concrete products is a great challenge for manufacturers and the trade. Manufacturers offer the end customer a large variety of variants which are difficult to present in exhibitions. Therefore, Lithon+, market leader in concrete products, has developed the world’s first Virtual Reality concrete product configurator with the XR High-Tech-Startup Zreality GmbH.
Everyone knows the problem: You plan your new terrace and go to the building materials dealer to choose new terrace slabs. Usually you find small exhibition areas, often the products you are interested in are missing and you have to deal with photos in catalogues.
Lithon+ was not satisfied with this and decided to go completely new ways with Virtual Reality. The requirement was: a customer must be able to easily experience all Lithon+ concrete products, whether at home, at retail or at trade fairs.
The result is the world’s first concrete product configurator with WebVR technology. The idea is as ingenious as it is simple: Lithon+ and Zreality designed a “mini-city” in which all concrete products can be viewed in different situations. You can see a bus stop, a modern office building, a large square with a park and a traditional building and at many points you can change the concrete products and colours. In addition, one would like to place the new terrace stones next to the pallisades in order to assess the effect. This usually doesn’t work on site – in Virtual Reality you can put together the desired combination with just a few clicks.
“The size of the surrounding area gives you the feeling of being in a real city,” enthuses Gregory Trautmann, one of the managing directors of Lithon+. “You can move around freely and take the effect of our product on large areas was really good. That was a problem that we could never solve optimally when it came to presenting our products. We naturally hope for more turnover through the use of VR and want to consistently expand the application to a sales and marketing tool for us”.
“The innovative thing about the Lithon+ project is the use of WebVR technology,” says Jan Knieriemen, Managing Director of Zreality. “With our Sphere platform, the only one in the world to master this technology, Lithon+ can now break new ground in product presentation. The application can be shown on smartphones, tablets and VR glasses, whether at trade fairs or in customer presentations. The clue, however, is that the application can also be easily integrated into the Lithon+ website or used in e-mail campaigns. The user then surf in “Virtual Reality”.
The project is now in its first phase and will be presented in Berlin on June 27. Afterwards the “Mini-City” will be expanded with further products by the end of the year and integrated into the Lithon+ website as a configurator.
Check out the website of Lithon to learn more: https://www.lithon.de/playground
The configurator is available here: http://lithon.zrealitysphere.com