Reinforced Earth: VR Concrete Fabrication Application

Designed for their sales and marketing team to engage new clients and showcase the unique features of the concrete products and installation processes.

The Client

The Reinforced Earth Group has been providing innovative solutions for major infrastructure projects in Australia and New Zealand since 1974. Reinforced Earth Pty Ltd belongs to the Terre Armée group of companies. Terre Armée has forged an unrivalled level of expertise and experience in reinforced backfill applications and soil-structure interaction. Our technical solutions are defined by four functions corresponding to the purpose of the structure to be designed: RETAIN, CROSS, PROTECT, STRENGTHEN. Over the last 60 years, Terre Armée has been setting the gold standard in reinforced earth structures and has played an active role in over 100,000 projects around the world.

The Challenge

Reinforced Earth fabricate concrete for large civil engineering projects. Their concrete products and installation process is unique and one of the challenges for the company is how best to convey this to clients. Once installed it’s impossible to show someone what’s inside the concrete or behind. Also unless you can actually watch the installation process it’s hard to understand the differences between this and other products on the market. Videos can do a fairly decent job of conveying some of these points but they were looking for a more engaging solution.

Our Solution

We decided that building a custom VR application with associated animations would be the best solution. It would allow Reinforced Earth to convey to the clients the intricate details of the fabricated concrete by allowing them to effectively view a cut-away of the concrete. Our team therefore set about creating a mockup city scape with bridges and tunnels. We then modelled all the required vehicle and equipment involved in the installation process. Once this was done we set about working with Reinforced Earth to accurately replicate the installation process through triggered animations.

The end result was a ‘digital twin’ of a real-world installation. Built in Unreal Engine it is a free-roaming VR experience where the user can walk or fly through the environment and by standing in certain positions trigger animated events. These events may be to show part of the installation process or pull out the concrete product so you can view how it’s built and what’s behind it or below it. Our team even triggered a locomotive to go by so and model the scene with a level crossing before Reinforced Earth transformed it into a tunnel and bridge.

VR application for Meta Quest 2

Desktop version with wireless controller navigation

Fully modelled cityscape environment

Animations triggered by the user within gameplay

Plant equipment & machinery accurately modelled

‘Pull out’ features triggered by user positions

Ability to walk or fly through the environment

Metadata displayed on ‘info popups’ around the scene

Full background audio effect

Real measurements on all valves & gauges

Intro planet animation to showcase other ‘worlds’

Fly down birds eyes plan view into cityscape scene

Project Team

Tim

Jamie

Mary

Anthony

Andrew

Client Testimonial

Riccardo Musella, Reinforced Earth

We have worked with 3D Walkabout to create a VR platform for our products. The final VR engine is really good, the graphics look great and the result is what we were looking for. Looking forward to expand the platform with further features!