High voltage guaranteed

What does a transmission system operator actually do? A question that few people ask, as many don’t know what it is or that it even exists. For most of us, electricity comes out of the socket 24/7 as a matter of course, but together with our customer 50 Hertz, we wanted to make it visible in a showroom that many people work for this every day.

We tell the story behind the stream

We start our VR journey in the hub, a modern building complex with a cozy lounge, terrace and showroom. From there, we teleport visitors by elevator to the various experiences and take them into the everyday lives of 50 Hertz employees.

On the open sea
Our journey begins on an offshore wind farm in the middle of the Baltic Sea between Germany, Denmark and Sweden – a place you would probably never go to in real life, as it is very dangerous and requires extensive safety precautions. So it’s all the better that you can explore the platform virtually at your leisure. The focus here is clearly on the experience.

A special feature here is the weather simulation: at the touch of a button, you can switch seamlessly between sunshine and storm, which contributes to an even more immersive and intense experience of this special place. On top of this, the light sailors can find out about international power distribution or the construction of a submarine cable, for example.

Now it’s getting tight
Our journey continues with the topic of bottleneck management. We bring visitors back to the headquarters and give them an insight into day-to-day business and the challenges that await employees. To do this, we designed an interactive table similar to a model railroad, where production, consumption and fluctuations in the electricity grid are visible. There we receive a report of a thunderstorm that has caused damage to the power grid.

After we were able to follow the lightning strike on a high-voltage pylon live, we had to react quickly to the power fluctuation. Various parameters of our miniature world can be adjusted for this purpose. In addition to the fun of the game, information on the subject of electricity transport is also incidentally retained.

Calm after the storm
We end our tour with another use case from the everyday life of a 50Hhertz employee. For this, we move on to a kind of command center. After a short detour to a wind farm that is producing more electricity than usual due to an approaching storm, the control center has to react: The aim is to balance out power peaks with as little effort as possible and keep the frequency constant in order to prevent outages. To do this, electricity must be cleverly sold or redistributed. We are also hiding a learning experience for users in this game: Because what many people don’t know is that the standardized grid frequency is 50 Hz, which is where our customer’s company name comes from. A fun fact that will stay with you long after you leave the showroom.

Let the spark ignite

We package the supposedly boring day-to-day work of a transmission system operator into exciting stories that visitors to the showroom can actively experience in the form of real-life situations. In this way, we link our customer’s message with sustainable experiences. This allows us to charge the topic with positive emotions in order to anchor it in the minds of customers in the long term.

The keyword is immersive storytelling and makes the decisive difference to classic explanatory videos. We also use gamification elements to ensure even more interaction and challenge users in exciting mini-games. In this way, we ensure even more engagement and the opportunity to immortalize yourself in high score lists.

Trailer 50 Hertz - High voltage guaranteed: Let the sparks fly with VR Trailer 50 Hertz - On the open sea: VR short trip to a wind farm in the Baltic Sea