The event, held in Joensuu at Tiedepuisto, focused on VR productions in Finland and how companies have benefitted from them. The first speaker in the Tuesday morning was Jukka Lappi, vice president of Wild Immersion Finland. Wild Immersion is a company that organizes virtual safaris experienced with VR headsets. Jukka Lappi explained the audience about what kind of effects do virtual safaris have.
“We have noticed, that when people leave the real world for 10 minutes and enter the beautiful nature in virtual reality, it decreases the stress level of the user. People are visibly refreshed, when they leave the experience.”
Lappi, who lives in Isle of Man in United Kingdom, told that people living in big cities can’t enter the nature in a similar way than for example the people of Joensuu can.
“It is easy for you to experience nature. It’s just outside your home. But also here people have moments, when it would be useful to relocate yourself sitting on the dock at your summer cottage. With VR headset you can experience many aspects of that and feel refreshed afterwards”, Lappi told the audience.
Currently Lappi is interested in using refreshing experiences in mental health care.
Wild Immersion is supported by Jane Goodall Institute, which wants to help to save the nature. That makes the work of Wild Immersion meaningful.
“That is important for us. When you are designing a VR production, you have to know who are you designing it for and what – something you can do – is important for them. That kind of thinking helps us to create new content for Wild Immersion.”
Other speakers at the event were focusing more on solutions helping industrial sector. Iiro Naamanka, part-owner and sales director of 3D Talo Finland informed the audience about many kinds of solutions they have done for product development and marketing purposes. Many companies have found it beneficial to create indoor replicas of their manufacturing facilities and digital twins to help train staff or create new products.
“A digital prototype can save you time and money. It is normal, that with a digital prototype you can skip a couple of development phases compared to physical prototype. Saving time and money are really concrete benefits for companies”, Naamanka explained.
In 3D Talo’s business marketing communications solutions are nowadays less popular than tools for industrial companies, because the benefits are not that obvious. In recent years 3D Talo has made some game-like experiences.
“We made a small slalom game for Tahko Ski Center, but to be honest, it is quite bad”, Naamanka confessed and made the audience laugh.
“But because there’s not that much fun content on VR headsets, this has been very popular. The user can go through some small slalom track in hill. The track is located in a replica of the real Tahko Ski Center hill. It looks good, but there’s not much to do, really.”
After the guest speakers finished all the particpants could try different experiences in 13 different spots at the event. Most of the users had some previous experience on VR headsets, so for them it was a good opportunity to experience the most current gear and think, how immersive technologies could help their own businesses.