building vr for pharma manufacturing

date: July 27, 2020

Problem: A pharmaceutical company needed to show their production facility to potential customers at trade shows. Customers couldn't visit actual clean rooms. Contamination risks made physical tours impossible. Existing virtual tours were flat 360 degree photos with no sense of scale.

Solution: A fully immersive, multiplayer VR experience of their spray drying facility. Customers at trade shows could put on a headset and walk through the clean room, examine equipment, and understand the production process.

What made it different

The real differentiator was the multiplayer architecture. Sales representatives could join remotely using deterministic networking. A customer in Milan and a sales expert in another country could stand in the same virtual space. The expert could point at a valve, explain the process, answer technical questions in context.

Instead of scheduling facility visits months in advance, the company could provide expert-guided tours anywhere in the world, on demand.

Understanding the customer

The target audience: pharma and biotech representatives at industry conferences. Startup executives evaluating contract manufacturing partners. Corporate teams validating equipment standards. Limited time, specific questions.

The insight that shaped everything: these customers weren't looking for entertainment. They were looking for confidence. Confidence that this facility could manufacture their products safely, reliably, at scale.

We chose photorealism over stylization. Trust required showing the actual facility. We shot ultra high-res 360 degree photos on-site and built the VR environment around that base. Every interaction revealed technical details. Tap on a valve, see its specifications. The experience taught without feeling like a tutorial.

Multiplayer was non-negotiable. Deterministic networking kept both clients synchronized: when one user pointed at equipment, both saw the gesture. When one played an animated process visualization, both watched the same frames.

Production

We ran 12 weeks in four sprints. The on-site filming happened in a single day. One person, one DSLR rig, around 60 minutes per room. Five camera positions per room, multiple exposures for HDR and stitching. Clean room standards meant minimal approved equipment.

The challenges were predictable but demanding. Reflective metal surfaces created stitching problems where algorithms couldn't match reflections across frames. Bright overhead lights, dark corners, and metal reflections all in the same shot. Limited time in full protective gear meant no second attempts.

On the software side, play, pause, rewind on animated process visualizations had to stay frame-perfect across clients. Voice networking layered on top for real-time conversation.

What we learned

Product vision prevents scope creep. We had clear target audience and business goals from day one. Features that didn't serve the core experience were rejected, no matter how technically interesting.

Multiplayer enables immediate expertise. Remote expert participation meant technical questions got answered in context, during the session, while the customer was looking at the relevant equipment. Photorealism constrained the workflow in ways we didn't anticipate. Clean rooms can't be art-directed, and there's no "we'll fix it in post" when stitching algorithms fail on reflective metal.

Result: Used at trade shows for two years. Changed how the company built relationships with potential customers. The principles we developed here, photorealistic capture, educational interactions, multiplayer architecture for expert access, became patterns we applied to subsequent projects.