Top 5 things we learned while creating a Virtual Reality experience for the city of St.Gallen

Last year an interesting project came knocking on our doors. Through a series of encounters we started working on a Virtual Reality experience for the city of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

St. Gallen is the regional center of northeast Switzerland. It has a beautiful downtown declared world heritage site by the UNESCO. And it is an economic powerhouse with a renowned university and a vibrant cultural scene with many museums.

It was a great opportunity for Weavr to showcase our technologies. We had a great photographer on board, and support from the city to get access to special and unique places in the city. The project has now been completed and will be shown at the StartSummit, a large event organized by the local university.

Looking back we wanted to write about the experiences we learned from this project.

1. Get off the beaten path to find the raw diamonds

The Abbey Library of St. Gallen is one of the jewels of the city. When we started the project we were told that they had Google already do a high resolution VR tour of the main floor. But when we were doing the photo shooting we were offered the possibility of shooting the building from the first floor as well. It resulted into a much nicer tour of the place. Later we learned that the access to the first floor is restricted, thus our footage is unique thanks to our photographer looking for a unique angle to shoot from.

The Abbey Library of St. Gallen as seen from the top floor.

The same thing happened with a beautiful natural park on the hills of the city called Drei Weieren. We were lucky that the first snow of the year had fallen when we did the photo shooting of the place. It turned into a beautiful peaceful experience that surprises even people from the city.

2. Experiment until your viewers are happy.

On some of the first versions of experiences we created had navigation maps, and every location had a set of hot spots for the users to teleport to the next place in the location. We were taking over some of the technologies that had worked in the real estate business into city sightseeing. We created maps for areas of the city like the Roterplatz, and modified the floor plan feature to accommodate for thematic mapping of museums.

Some sample floorplans we wanted to use: Map based, Floorplan based and Artist based.

Except that when we showed it to the test users they had issues finding their way around. Our statistics showed that they were abandoning these stories earlier than the other stories that were created in a linear way. Some users were coming back to the initial spot and navigating in a “star shaped” way. Also on some of the museums the main works of art of a given author were located not at the entrance but at the end of a room, and thus they were not being given the attention they deserved.

In the end we decided to create an entry room for all stories of large museums and have sub stories for each of their main topics. It simplified the overall experience since there were only two category of actions from the side of the user: Select a topic or View a linear VR experience.

3. Group experiences based on target customer segment.

One of the first things we did when we started the project was to get input from the city on the amount of places that needed to be showcased. We realized early that just placing all the stories up front would not be a wise decision, because we would run the risk of visitors get lost and overwhelmed by the paradox of choices.

An important group we had to serve was the people already living in the city

The folks at the city had great insight on their target public. It became clear that we were not only creating experiences for tourists, or that we could group categories based on groups like families with kids. An important group we had to serve was the people already living in the city, who knew the most popular spots, but wanted to be surprised with places they did not know existed like the Sitterwerk or the Lokremise.

So we created the Insider category, and it has been a pleasure see the surprise of some of the local folks who helped us test the end result when discovering these hidden gems from the city they thought they knew quite well. Like the views from the top of the city hall overlooking the city.

4: Not all museums are created equally.

When we started the project we thought we could reuse several of the display mechanisms that we had developed for our real estate and commercial customers. After all, showing a museum should be the same as showing a property, or is it?

The final answer is that it depends on the museum. There are museums which have a large permanent exhibition, like the Natural History Museum. And there are museums where the exhibition changes every few months like The Art Gallery of St. Gallen. Lastly you have museums with rotating exhibitions about the same artists like the Museum im Lagerhaus which specializes in Art Brut.

So we had to treat each museum as a project in itself. It took us several iterations to come up with the final way to show them, by using categories for the museum with the permanent exhibition, grouping the content by artist for the Art Brut museum and just showing the common areas for the art gallery.

5. Meet early face to face to finalize the experiences

As the deadline for the exhibition was getting closer we started to exchange mails with the city almost on a daily basis. It became clear that we were not progressing as we wanted, there were requests that were not clear, and sometimes we would think we would fix some things just to discover that they were not what the customer wanted.

The fact that we had two different entry points for the main story and every category did not help. The reason for the difference was that the WebVR entry points needed additional graphical elements to help the user navigate, while the VR experiences were using our standard navigation schemas.

So we spent two full days onsite going through every story and fixing the little details that were missing. Being in one room also allowed us to change things that the customer did not know were possible and to experience the issues first hand. One of the issue that we only figured out onsite was that our caching mechanisms for the main pages was not flushing correctly. So while our operator was doing every step properly, the customer was not seeing the final changes.

A happy VR visitor of St.Gallen in VR at the pre launch event at the Inspiration Market

The 25 virtual reality experiences of the city of St.Gallen are now online and will be launched at the Start Summit event on Thursday 15 of March, 2018.

We are thankful to the city for having trusted this project to us and specially to the team that helped us finalize the last details of the experience. They were not only patient but also flexible on their requests and understanding about the limitations of the technology.

The world of VR story telling is still at its infancy, and all content creators are experimenting to find the best way to present content to the users. We hope that our hints will be helpful to creative minds looking to amaze their audiences in VR. And if you are looking at testing your story telling skills try our VR experience editor!

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