By Louisa Watson, Director of Marketing for Wyboston Lakes Resort
Virtual reality (VR) in the hospitality and events sector is now on version 2.0 – and it’s an exciting experience and opportunity for venues and event planners.
It’s now around five years since the first VR headsets and applications created enormous excitement worldwide and inspired so many pages of editorial talking about how VR was going to create a wave of major changes in the way we work.
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VR is particularly beneficial
Certainly, for time poor meetings planners, virtual reality has been a great asset, allowing them to have multiple venue show rounds in rapid succession, all without leaving the office. For venues VR is particularly beneficial for those that are so often busy that it is difficult to find time for show rounds, or for those that are less accessible or far away.
Throughout that time, both tech developers and venues have been learning and enhancing it.
Now, the second generation of VR technology is providing highly flexible, captivating, showcases for venues. Higher quality resolution and greater sophistication in 3D rendering means that VR is in more widespread usage than ever before, with increased flexibility meaning that expensive and unwieldly headsets are no longer required.
Greater savings
Anticipating this trend, the VR technicians at Wyboston Lakes Resort have created a wide range of diverse next generation scenarios, which include theatre style and half-moons set ups, with each one bespoke to client specifications for events. This has led to greater savings in time and cost by eliminating the need for differing room set ups, which are often difficult to integrate around existing onsite business or live events.
The result is the ‘Dolls House experience’, which is included in Wyboston Lakes Resort’s technology infrastructure, providing a 3D, virtual experience throughout the venues, allowing visitors to explore meeting spaces and conference rooms from all angles.
The acclamation for this example of VR 2.0 is been tremendous.
The ‘dolls house’ feature
Among the many clients who have used and appreciated it is Mandy Bateman, Special Project Manager at the DRP Group Mandy says, “The ‘dolls house’ feature is an excellent tool and was really beneficial to our planning team, particularly on the weeks building up to our company conference when it was difficult to get all of our planning team to commit to a date that we could all attend an on-site show round.
Instead we used the system to navigate around a 3D version of the Woodlands Centre, meaning we could plan how we would use each area without having to leave our own office.”
Immersive technologies, such as VR, create limitless possibilities of different event spaces. Allowing for effective demonstrations, whether it be a show round or delivering a conference presentation, it is quick and easy to use and will soon be a standard feature of a venue’s hospitality and events services.
Saving time and money
The ultimate goal for VR in the hospitality and events industry is to allow users and clients to fully manipulate the digital environment to provide a fully realised mock-up of what they want their event to look like.
Venue teams on the ground will then be able to match that vision precisely, saving time and money. That reality has taken a giant leap forward with VR 2.0.
For more information, please visit www.wybostonlakes.co.uk/business
Contact Chris Lewis at Clareville; email chrislewis@clareville.co.uk or telephone 0207 736 4022
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