Crowne Plaza

Virtual Reality Engagement & Marketing Media

BRIEF

IHG has been undergoing a detailed design process to revamp their Crowne Plaza hotels, with Conran & Partners as the lead designers.

This process has involved several design iterations to reach a final approach, which is now being unveiled at a series of events – with an initial roll-out at a small number of pilot hotels. Soluis were engaged to produce high-quality fly-through animations of the design for the lobby and public spaces at ground level. IHG were also keen from the outset to utilise immersive technology to showcase these designs and use it to road-test them with stakeholders and operators.

Approach

Using Unreal Engine we created an immersive real-time environment for all the ground floor public areas and two variants of the standard hotel guest rooms.

The model can be viewed in desktop mode for a standard screen display and also via VR headsets, navigated intuitively with the hand-held controllers.

OUTCOME

The use of Unreal Engine in this process allows for high-quality images, 4K video and 360 panoramas to be generated directly from the real-time model quickly and efficiently.

This digital media can be delivered at a comparable level of visual quality to the original CG animation, but in a fraction of the time, as the costly and time-consuming rendering process is removed completely.

The real-time model of the proposed designs generated a resoundingly positive response from IHG, Conran & Partners, and all stakeholders who experienced this approach.

Going forward IHG plans to use this technique in visualising proposed hotel designs.

‘Just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support, diligence and professionalism in delivering this work. We are truly proud of what we have managed to achieve and look forward to sharing this with our colleagues next week in Berlin’