Stimulating customer interaction with VR

Vandewiele is a major player in the worldwide textile industry, managing design, development and production of textiles for flooring, home linen, fashion fabrics and technical textiles.

Vandewiele wanted to showcase their recent cutting-edge developments regarding their extrusion machine at the Textile & Garment Technology Exhibition fair in Barcelona, one of the biggest textile technology fairs in the world. What better way to inspire potential customers than using Virtual Reality to immerse visitors with this three story extrusion machine.

This is where Rhinox come into play.

How we worked

Our team developed a visualization that allows visitors and customers to experience the complete flow of the extrusion machine. The machine, which covers three floors, starts from polymer pellets and turns these into bobbins with yarn. The pellets are molten on the top level, extruded in bundles from a nozzle at the middle level, and spun into yarn on the lower level. There, the yarn is automatically wound onto three bobbins simultaneously. One unit of the machine runs three of these processes at the same time.

We started off from CAD drawings that were provided by Vandewiele. Then, we recreated and built every part of the machine in virtual reality, as well as the animation of the entire process. When a visitor steps into the virtual reality visualization, he or she can move to different perspectives by using the controllers. A first set of perspectives allows the visitor to see the machine in its full size, from a distance. Another set brings the visitor to different platforms in the machine itself. Different latches can be opened, allowing a closer look at what is happening inside the different parts. On top, we also integrated an x-ray vision of the melting unit, since there were no latches to be opened there.

The results

With this visualization, Vandewiele is able to introduce the machine to visitors and clients in an interactive and engaging way in, anywhere, without exposing visitors to any kind of risks.

This project was the first cooperation between Vandewiele and Rhinox, and we’re very proud of the result!

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