Client
Here East
Location
London
Sector
Government, Civic & Mega-Events
Digital Twins & Virtual Worlds
Services Provided
Strategy
Experience Masterplanning & Placemaking
Design
Experience Design
Virtual Design
Technology
Digital Twins, Real-Time Engines & Simulation
AR/VR/XR & Interactive Software
Delivery
Technical Direction & Production Management Marketing content
Here East is an innovation and technology campus situated in East London with a rich story to tell about its history, impact and vision for the future. To befit their positioning, they commissioned a Digital Twin of the campus to use as a communication aid when delivering talks and presentations about the campus and become a platform for remote viewing where travel was impractical.
Here East asked Journey to create a Digital Twin to show off the campus in real-time immersive 3D, as well as to develop a narrative to tell the backstory of Here East as part of the twin – how it came to be, who calls it home, and the impact it’s having on a local and national economy.
Here East has always lived at the intersection of technology and innovation. As such, it’s entirely natural for them to be amongst the first to embrace innovative new storytelling techniques and commission new presentation experiences.
The digital twin recreates the 1.2 million square feet of the Here East campus in fine detail, allowing visitors to explore on their own terms or be guided through a series of features that illustrate the clients desired narrative.
Here East wanted to explore the use of this technology to promote the district as an innovation hub and to speed up the tenant leasing process.
The campus’s success at home has attracted plenty of overseas interest. One of the reasons Here East wanted to experiment with digital twins was our platform’s unique ability to host virtual immersive meetings ‘inside’ the model and hence be able to conduct remote viewing and tours.
The capability of our virtual twin to create a genuinely immersive environment for meetings enables our client to present every aspect of their project to potential tenants, investors, and communities in real-time. Here East has innovation at its heart, and together we’ve created a product that really reflects that.
We employed SpaceForm – a dedicated platform for hosting digital twins that’s built around Unreal Engine 5.
The capability of Spaceform to create a genuinely immersive environment for meetings enables it to present every aspect of a project to potential tenants, investors, and communities in real time. This, in turn, accelerates decision-making processes, as it provides a level of detail beyond what traditional communication tools can offer.
Journey achieved this high degree of realism by integrating existing technical data with data gathered directly from the campus. A truly authentic representation is created by mapping photographs onto buildings and incorporating recorded sounds from the site into the digital model.
The addition of animated components, like people, vehicles, trees, and artificial and natural lighting, truly enlivens the twin. With the added effects of changing daylight and seasons, the simulation offers a deeply immersive experience.
The Twin and its unique communication features allow for the campus to be virtually recreated anywhere in the world, offering a practical way to assess its functionality in different territories.
To date, here east has leased 94% of its one-million-square-foot site.