VirtualExpo - Virtual Reality Exhibition Platform

• Hackathon and Industry Projects

Why this Project ?
Bandaranayake Memorial and International Conference Hall(BMICH) is the main place that hosts many international level exhibitions and events in Sri Lanka. The very famous International Book Exhibition, Educational Exhibitions like FutureMinds and Motorshow are some of them.
However it is a known issue that hosting physical exhibitions limits the reachability of exhibition specially for outstation cities and towns from Colombo. By preserving the interativity and engagement of physical exhibitions, we tried to design a new experience with Virtual Reality, to give the exhibition experience to any person via internet. Please check the below video.



How We implemented the VirtualExpo
I implemented this project together with Harith Kolitha Warnakulasooriya, one of my best friends. We used Unity3D for development and baked the project into WebGL to serve users via internet. We wanted to allow many users to reach this platform so we did not want to deploy this a a mobile app or wearable device based app which requires users to have Head Mounted Displays(HMDs) or wearable devices. In browser based web approach, we could reach many more users as we expectd.

To make this Virtual Reality Platform interactive, we included many features. Some of the are,

1. Virtual Exhibition Stalls in Different Categories
In a physical exhibition, stalls are sold under different price ranges in different categories. We incorporated the same in our application. We added stalls in 3 categories, such as Platinum, Gold and Silver.


2. Welcome Video Playback
When the user enters to an exhibition stall, we added a feature to play a short YouTube video. We detect stall entering event by collider based triggers we setup at stalls. And also we allowed VirtualExpo admin to change these videos without modifying the application code.


3. Brochure Download
Printed brochures are very common thing is physical exhibitions. We wanted to keep that interaction same in virtual platform, we we implemented a functionality to download brochures related to each exhibition stall. A pdf file can be downloaded into users computer.


4. Activity Track and Potential Customer Recommendations
This feature is loved by stall owners because we compiled a detailed report of user visits and engagement statistics at the end of each day. And also with the consent of users, they could recieve contact details of potential clients. We used social media based login so we could integrate Facebook APIs for more interactions between users and stall owners as well.


This project is hosted on AWS and and we are still updating the platform based on Sales and Marketing Team feedback. This project is one of the successful projects we could do as an industry project.