Decathlon is a French company and, with over 2193 stores in 57 countries, it is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. And it's also ALTKEY's first customer ever.
During these beginnings in 2016, ALTKEY was busy finding its feet when a former collaborator (Jean-François Tremblay) who was then working as a director at Valtech Canada contacted us. Valtech Canada is a digital marketing agency which, at that time, was looking to do virtual reality, but did not yet have an internal development team qualified in this field. Decathlon was already their client and Valtech wanted to offer them a virtual reality experience.
Decathlon owns several brands including the fabulous Quechua tents. Deploying tents in stores takes up a lot of space. The solution proposed by Valtech was to create a virtual reality kiosk and thus allow visitors to visit the tents freely in a virtual world.
To sell this solution to Decathlon, ALTKEY was asked to quickly create a first demo. In this demo, ALTKEY had modeled a tent by photogrammetry, created a complete outdoor environment with sound and an interactive button to change the models of tents visualized in the experience (all created in just 4 days).
Our demo was a hit with Decathlon and this is how Valtech awarded us our first contract, that is to say, to create a fun experience to promote the sale of Quechua tents in virtual reality.
Decathlon first sent us a preview of the new collection of Quechua tents it wanted to present in the experience. We digitized them by photogrammetry, then modeled, optimized and animated them in 3D.
In the Decathlon experience, users first see a small floating island with three areas (forest, desert and mountain). After choosing their preferred environment, users are projected into this realistic environment. A tent selection menu floats in the air and users can choose the tent they want to visit. The tent then appears in front of them and they can walk or teleport themself around this environment to explore this tent in depth.
For additional information, there are information bubbles placed on the tents. These bubbles present, when activated by the user, the advantageous attributes of the tents with images or videos.
Each environment also offers a Weather button that allows you to modify the environment. These buttons are used to present the physical attributes of the Decathlon tents. For example, the weather button in the forest environment activates clouds and rain, emphasizing the waterproof characteristics of the tents. In the desert environment, it is a day vs night change that highlights resistance to temperature change. And finally, we can activate the wind in the mountain environment, this feature shows how resilient tents are when buffeted by the wind.
Users can also pick their favorite tents and receive, by email after the experience, a list of the tents they have visited and chosen as favorites. It is also interesting information for Decathlon to know.
