DALLAS — Today, Freeman launched its new AI-powered 3D venue visualization platform, Freeman Blue Echo, which uses scans of convention centers to create fully navigable environments to plan, visualize and experience an event’s design before getting onsite.
The new tool aims to provide designers, organizers and brands the ability to explore floor layouts, activations and attendee journeys in a 3D photorealistic version of venues. This means partners can test layouts and sponsorship placements to help make smarter, more effective investments.
“Our goal with the Blue Echo project was to create a special intelligence library, and what that means is going out and actually capturing all these convention spaces in a way where we can have an interactive digital twin that we can operate within for what we deliver to our clients,” said Kedar Deshpande, Vice President of Innovation at Freeman. “Our planners, our designers, our brand managers, each have a different perspective to look at these environments to move the same event forward.”
The new digital entities can show not only all the branding and sponsorship opportunities, like banners and LED walls available in the venue, but they can also show what those offerings look like with the real event materials and show graphics that would be used onsite at the show.
Designers can also place their exhibit into the environment to see how it will look against its surroundings, giving insight into aspects like sightlines, potential traffic patterns and other things that are hard to convey via 2D floor plans.
“One benefit that we do have is being able to have this interactive space. While we’re having conversations with the clients in the past, an account member would have a conversation. They would go back to the design team and convey that information, then they translate it and come up with a new render. A few days later, here we go,” Deshpande said. “The goal here is really to compress all of that work and not lose any of the benefits of a partnership, extending visual communications and making decisions faster.”
From an internal perspective, these environments also show rigging points, dimensions, loading bay areas and other operational information that creates a more efficient move-in and move-out experience.
All of these usages can also lead to better problem-solving, as issues from the year prior can be tested and fixed in the 3D environment, and future potential issues resolved before even stepping foot in the convention center.
Taking Inspiration from Outside Industries
The technology that Freeman Blue Echo runs on is only a few years old, and has been mainly used in the entertainment and media industry to create holograms.
According to Deshpande, another example of this kind of technology being used was at the latest Winter Olympics in skating events to determine who crossed the finish line first.
“The Olympics were a great advertisement for what this could do,” Deshpande said. “It is surprising how few industries are really taking advantage of this, but the ones that know how environments work or the value of visual communications are the ones really jumping into it. I think Freeman is one of the first to do it within the space of convention centers because we know the value of visual communications and the process that we work in with our clients, and we know it’s going to make a huge difference.”
Currently, Freeman is using the technology to scan 20 convention centers, including Chicago’s McCormick Place, the Las Vegas Convention Center and San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
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