The IMERSUM team created a unique VR tour for the 90th anniversary of the Zaporizhstal.
On November 16, 2023, the most famous metallurgical enterprise from Zaporizhzhia – Zaporizhstal – turned 90 years old. Before this date, the company together with the IMERSUM team created a virtual tour of the metallurgical site, which was named “The Way of Steel”
The IMERSUM team implemented the technical component of this project.
VR Tour The Way of Steel is a steel production chain that our team has digitized and opened in VR for viewing.
But they also added interactive elements, for example:
- Viewing each location is accompanied by an audio guide that explains the purpose of this workshop and tells about its history
- In each location there are interactive points, by clicking on which you can read interesting facts or watch a video of the production processes in this workshop
- A quest quiz was built into the VR tour. It gives the user the opportunity, walking through the shops, to find questions and give their answers. The questions include interesting and little-known facts about steel production and the Zaporizhstal plant.
How we did it:
The process of creating a virtual tour consisted of several stages:
- The very first stage is getting to know the plant. That is, we, the IMERSUM team, went through this steel path ourselves, which we later had to digitize. This was done with the company’s specialists, who explained step by step all the technological processes. In this way, information was obtained for creating a shooting scenario, selecting locations, taking into account the specifics of work at each location – for example, preparing for work in conditions of elevated temperatures.
- Then directly the shooting, which was carried out with the help of special photo equipment of 360-degree panoramas. Due to the high temperature in the shop, filming lasted for several days.
- The specialists of our team “gathered” panoramas and their technical processing from the obtained photo materials for about 7 days – this was important in order to obtain the highest quality visualization.
- The next stage was the software part – that is, writing the virtual tour code from the received 360 panoramas.
- Next, the process of adapting the VR tour was carried out for viewing on all common devices – PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, as well as for virtual reality glasses Google Cardboard and virtual reality helmets of the Oculus (Meta) family. It took another 15 days.
Equipment: A full-frame Canon camera with a special lens and a professional Nodal Ninja panoramic head were used to shoot the panoramas. And for the software part, a PC and specialized software were used.
And why was VR chosen?
The format of the virtual tour allows anyone who wants to dive deeper into the atmosphere and technical processes of steel production, learn new interesting facts about metallurgy and its role in human life, and also discover the hitherto unknown Zaporizhstal. This is a modern presentation format for a modern enterprise, which is Zaporizhstal.
