Showcase examples and case studies

3D models and illustrations are always attractive to people, no matter whether they work in the industry or not. Almost everyone acknowledges the importance of showcasing their successful examples to their audiences. For those who provide 3D scanners and software, it is essential to address the strengths of their products through the final result. Your example also helps you to make your company’s brand more identifiable and outlines the difference with others. With specific examples, you can put your clients in the shoes you customized for them. It can be a video recording of the 3D models, preparation or working diary, or even test examples you just tried out during your free time. These examples help to create an adequate connection between your scanners/hardware/software with the final result, so clients will get a clear understanding of what they will be expected when they purchase your products. 

Case studies are also significantly important, as it showcases the entire workflow as well as your company’s philosophy throughout the whole story. Suppose you even get authorization from your previous clients or partners. In that case, you can include their names in the story line as a character, and explain to your audiences why your involvement makes a significant difference that others cannot. 

Advice N0.2

Not just photos, but also videos and 3D visualization platforms

No matter if you are a service or product provider, you are aware that you are working in the 3D tech industries, right? There is no doubt that you will be the first one who takes advantage of 3D visualization, in all aspects. If your clients can benefit from using your technology, you can do as well. Photos are great if you would like to showcase all these details or the overall structure of the 3D models, but that is far more than enough. 

You shall consider using specific platforms to record your 3D point clouds, or even share it, such as VAM2. From my previous experience, both the LinkedIn audiences and our clients love to watch their 3D models as they are playing a game. With some web-browser based platforms (like VAM2), you can simply use your mouse and keyboard to move around and view 3D models regardless of file size or the device. Audiences always want more than just a photo, with an active 3D model online, the entire product story line will be completed. 

Advice No.3

Connect your products with the final result

“What does it mean to me if I make a purchase?”

Customers usually tend to balance between their expected result and the amount of money they invested. When it comes to professional 3D scanners, the market does favor not only those that are popular but also those with numbers and significant results. There are many different ways for you to connect your product/service with the final result, and it depends on the target audiences you are focusing on. For scanner providers, the target audience is very diverse, and obviously, they have different needs and requirements. Everyone loves an easy-to-use product with good results, so address that!

Advice No.4

Address visualization possibilities with your 3D models

There are so many things that a 3D model can achieve, no matter if it is a high precision point cloud or a quick, cheap mesh. Clients in the different levels of the market might also use the 3D model differently. An engineer might look for a high precision 3D RGB point cloud that can visualize a 0.03mm crack in a tunnel, yet an art collector will need a 6MB 3D point cloud that can quickly be loaded to showcase its gallery and collections. 

Even though our clients are usually the one who use the 3D models, it is also interesting to know that not everyone knows how to use their 3D assets wisely. A 3D marketer needs to showcase the enormous possibilities of these 3D assets, such as improving shopping experience; speed up workflow; visualize assets; enrich entertainment. This will become clearer if you see this task as gold-digging ——- finding the shiny part within the sand. After all, everyone will be impressed by the power of storytelling.

Advice No. 5

Webinar and live-streaming will make your brand alive.

Online events such as webinar and live-streaming became even more important in the pandemic. Up to now, there is still nothing that can replace the feeling of seeing a person’s face. Webinars do not only enable you to do a talk online but also enables you to showcase a specific topic in any form you like to a group of potential users. It involves some interaction as well, one can comment or share, and another one can ask and answer questions. Things became alive, and more importantly, these chat moments can be prolonged with the shares, likes and comments on the Internet. 

Advice No.6

Listen to feedback, not just the number of likes.

In social media marketing, some figures are easy to draw you or your boss’s attention away, such as the number of likes, shares, comments or followers. There is no doubt that you can never do real social marketing if you don’t keep these figures growing, but never forget the purpose of why you are doing social marketing here —– to enable your company and your clients to get to know each other, and make the brand alive. Surprise or not, social marketing channels are excellent places for you to reach out to a group of special audiences that might not come across to your business in daily activities, yet one of them might be your future clients as well. Through sharing useful news, case studies, updates, or examples, each post you created provides a related topic for your online community to discuss with. Thus, you can see some useful feedback as time goes by. These feedbacks might not be as obvious as you thought, but you will end up realizing what are some points that you did not explain or highlight, which further draw confusions to readers. Or else, which functionality really hit the pain spot of your clients. 

Advice No.7

Seek for collaboration and partnerships with other 3D Tech providers

Same as any other tech sectors, 3D-tech industries are a combination of different providers and users. Over the entire tech journey of your clients, it is often that it involves using several hardware and software to produce the desired outcomes. Finding your companions to target the right group of audiences will benefit both parties, you and the other provider as well. Considering both of you are building upon each other’s brands, it became easier for you to sell your product to a mature group of users. In return, you can also promote your partner’s product and services to those long-term users to speed up their workflow. 

Advice No.8

Think creatively, how can you help?

Providing a 3D solution is never just giving out a quality 3D model but much more than that. Nowadays, 3D assets are easier to access; some even treat it the same as other traditional digital assets, such as photo, video, audio or documentation. Understanding what role your 3D assets play in your client’s workflow can make a significant difference. To show your compassion and professional knowledge in this, you can use these 3D assets as part of the story. For instance, engineers who are working in the oil rig platform are looking for a fast, easy-to-use but also safe scanner. Therefore I will recommend using the Civetta. But what makes this scanner special? Well, we can instantly upload all the panorama images to the VAM2, so then people in the onshore center can also visualize the result on the same day! That is the main point that makes both onshore and offshore engineers favor Weiss AG’s 3D solution. In other words, try to integrate your 3D solutions to your client’s workflow in a reasonable but also personalized way.

Advice No.9

Details, details, details

In many cases, it is the details that are able to make several different functions to link together and finally be useful at work. It is excellent if you are a person that really cares about the details of your products but also bear in mind that your clients will be even more confused if you spend hours to explain the design and purpose of each component. Other than that, showing to them how these details can end up making them the critical change makers to achieve clients’ requirements. Treat these detail designs as a dessert, not the main. 

Advice No.10

Work with a team, don’t fight alone.

Almost everyone knows the importance of team work when promoting your company’s brand to the market. It does involve not only posting or design, but also a deep understanding of your client’s behaviors, workflow, as well as a bit of technological theory and practices (if you meant to work in the 3D industry). If you are starting marketing like me, as an individual without a computer science background, feel free to keep your questions in mind and try to understand your hardware/software from your clients’ perspective, as well as understand the reason why things function in such way. There is always a reason when it comes to tech. 

Conclusion

I wish these 10 pieces of advice I provided are useful for you and your team. Surprise or not, many 3D technology companies do not even do any marketing in the space. As you know, marketing is never easy. However, with the development of technology, you can do a lot more than you once can, not just reaching the guy on the other side of the table. Feel free to send me a message or email me if you would like to share your piece of advice about marketing in the 3D Tech space. 

Author: Christiane Zhao

What is photogrammetry?

Photogrammetry is nearly as old as photography itself. Photogrammetry is a technique for capturing 3D photographs and assembling them into 3D models. A photogrammetry scanner can be a phone, camera or a professional high precision scanner, like Civetta.

1.    Cultural Heritage

In the past years, 3D photogrammetry scanning, visualization, and reconstruction became more popular in cultural heritage. Cultural heritage faces challenges such as natural disaster, natural ageing, destruction, armed conflicts and more. Given the travel restriction due to the coronavirus pandemic, more attention and public funding are going towards digitalization. Photogrammetry remains the best way to produce a highly precise digital twin with rich details, textures, lighting and colors. With the scanned data and 3D models, professionals can reconstruct a realistic media form for the public and academic to access. The pandemic also gave the public an entirely new opportunity to adopt a new way to engage with our historical places and heritage, both visually and spiritually.

#For these two photos, visualization and animation are made with #NUBIGON

3D Models can do a lot more than just as a digital twin of the physical heritage, but act as a map of a project —- heritage-related projects in the documentation, reconstruction, maintenance or curation. With hyperlinks, users can connect all digital assets to a specific location or even point of a 3D point clouds model.

Check out this video

2.    Museums & Art Galleries

Museums and art galleries have tasted the sweets and bitters throughout the entire 2020. Under more tremendous financial pressures and barriers to visits, museums and galleries finally decided to embrace new media and 3D technology to transform their physical presents to virtual. These museum & gallery’ experts widely use 3D photogrammetry technology to capture and document their exhibition halls and collections. Digital identity has been created not just for the museum but also for a single piece of their collection — these are later used as the raw materials for virtual tour, virtual management, and virtual curation.

Check out this video example of virtual curation

Check out this video example for virtual exhibition

3.    News & Journalism

3D photogrammetry method enables an entirely new way for the reader to explore a real environment given by the journalists, yet virtually. Since late 2019, the New York Times’ team has researched practically and implies photogrammetry for their Internet readers to interact with a 3D point cloud city block while reading a related article explaining the story and details. The team planned to use photogrammetry to report issues among neighborhoods and investigative reporting and crime-scene analysis. 

The way of interaction has been simplified to the scrolling of the mouse in an article page, yet the result is stunning. Two great existing examples have released the enormous possibilities of implying such a capture technology on these traditional online news feed.

The first example is a series of walks around town experience for the Chinatown in New York. When you are scrolling down a street in Chinatowns, frames of old photos will pump up on the street for comparison. Viewers can pay attention to the details and wander through a story non-linearity in a street, block, or even the entire city region. All of these can be done with photogrammetry. Only it can perfectly show the vibrant colors, textures or even the ever-changing light conditions of the space.

NY Times Example: NY Times Chinatown, Resilent and Proud

Another example is a 3D reconstructing journalistic scene made by the Research & Development team in the New York Times. Also, only with clicking and scrolling, you can visually explore the 360-degrees of an artists’ loft in Rhode Island. With your mouse keep scrolling down, the room’s objects will become more in detailed and shaped. It has indirectly showcased to any reader the logic behind photogrammetry —– the more usable photos you took about an object from all angles, the more accurate and complete your 3D models will be. The 360 VR experience of a 3D model is implanted in a traditional article setting, which is a strong statement of embracing 3D photogrammetry technology in future journalism.

NY Times Example:

Reconstructing Journalistic Scenes in 3D

Reconstructing Journalistic Scenes in 3D

4.    Oil & Gas Industries

Oil and Gas industries are the pioneers in using 3D photogrammetry, especially for offshore platform documentation and maintenance. While laser scanning has been used for accurate BIM documentation, photogrammetry can visualize detailed details that cannot be captured by laser scanning, such as drainage patterns, vegetation changes, color changes, soil anomalies, and formational outcroppings and more. 3D mapping (with photogrammetry scanner like the Civetta) can quickly and comprehensively obtain the entire offshore platform’s health status. These visualized data, including 360 panorama images and 3D models, can be visually managed and notes, documents, audio, and videos before sent to the onshore office. During the pandemic, traveling became significantly difficult, and the risk of infection is also high among offshore platforms. 3D photogrammetry can quickly capture all the essential details and support engineers and management team to make decisions based on virtual details but not just a single photo or notes.

See example here: https://share.weiss-ag.com/gasandoil/

5.    E-commerce & Online Shopping

The pandemic forced a big push to an online e-commerce store, where the customers are spending a greater amount of time browsing and shopping online. 3D photogrammetry has produced 360-degrees VR photo series and 3D models for customers to closely view and even interact with these products they are about to shop. Researches also show videos, VR and 3D models bring more extraordinary shopping experience for customers, and these new media are expected to get more involved in the e-commerce space. Given some automatic product capturing machine, a visual asset management platform can automatically store and distribute product portfolios.

Check here for examples of VAM2 connected with PhotoRobot: VAM2 release notes/

6.    Tourism

Certainly, 2020/21 has and is a disastrous year for the tourism industry: cancelled flights, restriction on border entry and closure of public areas. Some see it as an opportunity for growth for smart tourism and virtual tourism. Quick and precise capture of 360 panorama images, videos, and 3D point clouds enable a more comprehensive range of internet citizens to explore the space. 3D photogrammetry technology combined with other technology, such as digital mapping, creates a more digitally accessible experience, with a broader audience, more significant interaction and larger scales.

7.    Civil Construction & Architecture

While laser scanning is dominating the construction field, the industry has still foreseen the 3D photogrammetry technique’s unique potential. Photogrammetry and photogrammetric measurements have been used for material testing and measurements in civil engineering. 

8.    Marketing & Advertisement

3D models and 360 panorama images are more likely to be adopted for digital marketing in 2020. Photogrammetry technology revolves around communication and how well marketers can communicate information to their potential customers with an additional aspect — 3D. 3D models and panorama offer the market a bit more information on the webpages and help the company shape its brands using advanced technology.

Not surprisingly, some more platforms and websites gain their abilities to showcase and store 3D models. While most of these platforms can only showcase low solution files, a management system can view and keep any 3D models with the unlimited file size (like VAM2.com). With the photogrammetry technique, a 3D model can look like a real object, if you also consider online rendering Felix Render UK.

9.    Training & Education

While virtual training has been around for 20 years, 2020 and 2021 are the real turning points for entities to rethink e-training and education. Pandemic and quarantine bring high hope on virtual e-training and online education, especially for safety training, maintenance inspection, interactive presentation and more. E-Training usually involves 360 videos, 360 panorama VR as well as 3D models. With the maturity of VR and 3D, companies can produce interactive environments themselves. Thus, students can have an excellent user experience in specific sites via they are away in a traditional classroom or meeting room. Photogrammetry technology enables developers to build a virtual training program via a real-life setting, such as exhibition halls, playgrounds, school, oil rig platform, airplanes and more. One can also consider remix photographs, videos and 3D point clouds.

virtual e-training examples

10. Film, Gaming and Entertainment

The entertainment industries became more and more important for a lock down year like 2020 and 2021. Photogrammetry technology has been widely adopted and used in films for years, gaming and entertainment industries; artists and technicians are saving a lot of time creating scenes / shots if they are built upon on real photographs or 3D models. With the advancement of game realism, more film-like product techniques are being used in a game for visualization. As video games continue to improve their reflections of reality into the 2020s, graphical accuracy will remain a core game element. If you would like to capture a very high-quality HDR photo for gaming and film, you should consider the most precise 230 megapixels, 360-degrees camera in the market — Civetta.

Author: Christiane Zhao

“First and foremost it’s important to recognize that so much heritage is natural, and so much of nature is heritage,”

~ Dr. Meredith Wiggins

said by Dr. Meredith Wiggins of Historic England. Due to climate changes and other human factors, heritage has been affected by different ways, which makes digitalised heritage so much more important nowadays.

The Guangzhou MG Data Tech Ltd., a 3D company dedicated to digitally recording, archiving and sharing the world’s cultural heritage, is partnering with International experts in the field of 3D visualization and restoration to capture, process, render and preserve cultural history with unprecedented visual accuracy. For instance, MG Data Tech collaborated with the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern / Virtual Design to showcase a virtual museum that is based in Shan Xi, China. The MG Data Tech did all the scanning and provided high-quality RGB point clouds for the university lab. The latter one uses Unity to reconstruct the file and produce a 3D virtual experience for visitors in Germany.

With the help of the VR glasses, it is thus possible to move freely in the three-dimensional virtual reconstruction, explore the temple and interact with other users. Besides, holograms explaining the history of the items can appear in front of the users. The magnificent frescoes that cover the interior walls of the temple were depicted in a true-to-life manner and fascinate the visitors. The extraordinary digital reconstruction was also presented to the visitors as part of the official German Chinese cultural program 2017 during the long Night of Culture in Kaiserslautern.

Photogrammetry is an essential part of MG Data Tech’s Digital Preservation process. This simple photo-based documentation method allows anyone to capture measurable data through photographs—making it easier and cheaper to document sites than ever before.

At its most basic, photogrammetry is the science of using overlapping photographs to reconstruct three-dimensional scenes or objects. While almost any camera can be used, it is essential to notice, the better the camera, the more precise the model. MG Data Tech further provides a 360-degree panoramic camera(Civetta) for their photographers and clients who have a significant needs in accurate, high-quality digitalization. With a single-click and 40 seconds waiting time, the Civetta can scan the entire environment and produce a 230-pixel HDR panoramic photo of the scene. Since the Civetta has only one button, it is elementary to use for staff with any background.

A MG Data Tech project can capture more than thousands of photographs per day in the field. With “structured camera”, the computer became easier to find the common points in-between the images. Thus, in other words, the photogrammetry device and software provided by the MG Data Tech offers a much higher resolution, better color accuracy, and strong dynamic range which reduce the number of photographs required to document a historic site. Reliability and extraordinary image quality are also realized by the Civetta, effectively eliminating the possibility of shutter failure and motion blur in the field.

The Guangzhou MG Data Tech Ltd believe that both archaeologist and digitalization specialists have a common interest in igniting such wonder, as we hope that public interest will aid us in preserving the past. We keep experimenting with different ways in digital storytelling, which convey various aspects of the past. Digitalization and the advancement of technologies form a more intimate connection between the past and present, mainly when it contains rich details about the past. The future of digital heritage looks promising.  

Experience and view it by yourself in VAM2, our Visual Asset Management Application.

The Kaihua Temple in Virtual Reality Project has been mentioned in the MIT Press.

A literature review that mentioned the Kaihuasi Temple VR project as an outstanding example in the Wiley Online Library.

Author: Christiane Zhao