The customer: M2 Studio
The project: A hospital addition with a budget of $300 million.
The products: HTC Vive Pro and The Wild VR collaboration platform.
The goal: To give major donors a visual walkthrough of the planned patient room and to persuade them to continue funding the hospital.
The execution: M2 Studio collaborated with the hospital to visualize the space to donors through the use of The Wild on two VR headsets.
The result: M2 Studio received “nothing but glowing reviews” of the experience, and the software impressed the donors and hospital representatives.
M2 Studio is a visualization production studio that works with the architecture and real estate industries. When owner Michael Potts realized he needed a solution for client presentations, he was prepared to invest the money and time into developing his own virtual reality software. Instead, he ended up using our software, The Wild.
“My team went to a VR conference in the fall of last year looking for a solution like The Wild,” Potts said. “It was either that or hire developers to make the software. There was The Wild and another company, and The Wild’s price point was a lot better. This made us more comfortable taking a risk on it.”
“When you’re working in 3D, it’s really nice to be able to be in that same room with someone else. That’s been really hard to do up until the last year or so. The Wild gives us that ability.”
The risk that Potts took on The Wild paid off. After signing up for our virtual reality collaboration platform, Potts and his team put it to use with their client, a hospital that was making a $300 million addition to their building. “We needed a way to have multiple people in the patient room touring it and understanding what it was going to feel like in VR,” said Potts.
Rendering of M2 Studios' design for a new patient hospital room. Video courtesy of M2 Studio/The Wild.
The hospital brought on Potts to create an immersive presentation for the hospital’s donors. When the donors showed up, the hospital gave them Potts’ two HTC Vive Pro headsets to tour the renderings in VR. “This was predominantly a fundraising tool,” said Potts. “They are trying to get the biggest donors to donate more and understand what they are donating to.”
Over the course of a few hours, they were able to put the VR headsets on 40 to 50 donors to show them the addition. Both the hospital and the donors were impressed. “I got nothing but glowing reviews and everyone was really appreciative," Potts said.
Since Potts has been in the industry for a long time – he started M2 Studio in 2000 – he’s owned every type of headset that’s come out over the past 19 years.
“This has been my passion for a long time,” he said. “We had a system in the mid-2000s that allowed for interactive walkthroughs, and VR was way more expensive and complicated back then. It was 50 to 100 times more expensive.”
Though Potts used the HTC Vive Pro for his donor presentation, he’s going to utilize the Oculus Quest in the future because it has better capabilities. For instance, the HTC Vive Pro comes with a higher price tag, and when he had to use VR for a client presentation, he’d have to bring extra wires, monitors, computers, a tripod, two lighthouses, and a table to put all his gear on.
The Oculus Quest was released in May, and Potts said that since he purchased it two months ago, it’s been an absolute game-changer. It’s wireless, which means he doesn’t need all the extra gear. When he’s doing a presentation to groups of people, he can walk wherever he wants, because he’s not hooked up to any cables.
“We are thinking of sending it to our biggest clients and saying, ‘Here’s a headset we can collaborate with you back and forth on. Before, it would have been a $4,000 solution, and now it’s a $400 solution.”
With the combination of our software and the affordable headset, Potts and his team are able to carry out tasks much more quickly. “It saves us a lot of time because we don’t have to build a solution. We don’t have to drive to our clients’ offices, which is great. When you’re working in 3D, it’s really nice to be able to be in that same room with someone else. That’s been really hard to do up until the last year or so. The Wild gives us that ability.”
Potts continued, “Oculus Quest and The Wild are two things that are perfectly matched together. We may have to come back and study the threshold of the quality we want to achieve with the Oculus Quest, because if you go too high you’ll push beyond what’s possible with it. But all the benefits make it worth slimming down your design and experience slightly. It’ll pay off because it’s seamless, it’s quick, and it looks good.”
Learn more about The Wild for Oculus Quest
“The number of users simultaneously is a really big deal. You could have a client in LA, us here in Dallas, a major donor in another city, and an architect somewhere else having a conversation together.”
On a daily basis, Potts and his team are using Autodesk 3ds Max, which offers rendering for design visualization. Though he hasn’t yet used our software for designing a project, he hopes to continue utilizing it in upcoming projects for client VR presentations.
“We’re working on a park expansion in downtown Dallas that The Wild is a good candidate for,” he said. “The Wild is great for experiencing what it’s like to be in a space and in an environment, whether that’s a casino or a lobby or a concourse of an airport. It’s perfect.”
What is very helpful, said Potts, is the fact that multiple people can be inside of The Wild at once. “The number of users simultaneously is a really big deal. You could have a client in LA, us here in Dallas, a major donor in another city, and an architect somewhere else having a conversation together.”
Potts and his clients were not the only ones impressed by the hospital addition project; We were excited by how Potts and his team used the software. “When we showed it to the team at The Wild, they said, ‘Holy cow, we haven’t seen anyone do what you did with it.’”
Overall, Potts said he would recommend The Wild because of our unique VR collaboration and multiuser VR experience. “This is a really great tool for designers and architects who need something that is plug and play and multiuser. I can’t think of anything that is a better solution. There are other products out there, but The Wild has been a home run and solved a big problem.”
Are you interested in a VR collaboration tool that also offers design prototyping? Get started with The Wild today to realize the possibilities for your team.
