Content Collides with Experience

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: Hello, everyone. Great to not see you all. Cheers. Have my coffee here.

Woke up nice and early to share my incredible wisdom with you across the globe. So it's really strange to be doing things this way, but I'm going to pretend I'm sitting in the living room just with you guys one-on-one. Or if that's too creepy, maybe 100-on-one. And I'm going to share with you a bit of a vision, and a very, I would say, aspirational version of the Arch-Viz industry.

And really, it's a very idealized version to some extent, the future that I see. And the thing is, though, I love this industry. I love working. I've been doing this now for close to 12, 13, 14 years, depending from when you start counting. And almost every day, I get up and go, wow, this is incredible. I can't believe the work that we do and the opportunities ahead.

So I think it's worthy in this time to kind of really look ahead at what's coming. But it's not just a cloud, blue sky, pipe dream kind of vision. A lot of the stuff is the direction where we, as a business-- Binyan. I'm Andrei from Binyan. I should have said that at the beginning, but you can see that in the slide. This is where we're heading.

For us, digital experience, which I'll be discussing today, is the new frontier. And it's something that definitely we're putting out money, so to speak, where our mouth is and launching our own digital experience team in the months ahead, which we've been working on internally for quite a while now. So I'm going to be talking, hopefully, for 30, 40 minutes, and then there will be time for questions.

So the title of the conversation here today is Content Collides with Experience, How architectural and real estate CGI and animation is breaking through the screen into emerging space of digital experience DX. And I'll switch back between DX and digital experience throughout the presentation. For those that don't know who I am, I'm Andrei. I am the founder and CEO of Binyan.

We're an architectural, 3D rendering, and animation, and now, also, digital experience studio with offices in Melbourne, Sydney, New York, and London. And we work all over the world. We have 100-odd people in the company.

It's really something I built from the ground up with the most incredible team and people with me, who many of them been with me on this journey all throughout. So even though we're been around over 10 years now, it still feels, on the one hand, very young, but also we've seen it all and we still have the energy of, on the other hand, of that day one passion burning right here. OK.

So number one-- I'll change the slide-- is just give a little bit of context and a bit of background of the history of Arch-Viz, or Arch-Viz, for some reason, people call it sometimes, and where it's coming from and where that's going. And I'm going to do that through the prism of a bit of a paradigm and a evolutionary step-by-step process that many industries go through. And I will apply this, even though it's not directly applicable, but in many ways there are parallels which I will apply to our industry.

So this is the slide that I just found this in Harvard Business Review article about the concept of the experience economy. So in this article it actually starts off with the metaphor of the cake industry. In the beginning, cake was, like, a commodity, which means that people just made cakes for their daughter's birthday party, they would just make a cake.

Then, it became a good. They would go get baking ingredients and use those to make a cake at home. Then, it became a service where they would go to a cake-making company, and they would deliver them the cake, and it would be all fancy. And finally, it's an experience where they go to some sort of, like, sweet shop extravaganza, and it's not just a cake. It's a lot more than a cake, and it's immersive and experiential.

So in a way, every industry goes through this kind of progression, going from, at first, in a sense, being a commodity, which means being able to deliver a particular skill, knowing how to use the tools. Then, becoming something more than that in terms of a good, something unique that's being created from those tools. Then, a service, which means it's not just using the tools, but also using the ideas of the people using the tools. And finally, the realm of experience, which we'll get to.

So in our industry, I would say it begins with-- so this is a great quote from this article. So commodities, which is that first stage of the industry evolution, are fungible, meaning they're interchangeable. Goods are tangible, services intangible, and experiences, which is the object of our discussion here, are memorable.

So our industry began-- this way before, and this is the work of Hugh Ferris, for example, began as architectural illustration-- it was hand illustration. Then, this sort of thing, watercolors. The first stage of the digital architectural 3D rendering industry or Arch-Viz was essentially saying, OK, this was done with watercolor. And now, let's do the same thing, or something similar, with computer tools using Autodesk tools and others.

And so this is stage one saying, we can now use the tools. Mastery at the base level, but in a sense, anyone who can use the tools can get some sort of outcome. Then it evolved into, I would say, goods. And now, this is some of our work.

Goods, meaning you take those tools and you create something-- art. You create something that's much more magical from them. Just a little bit of examples of various projects that we've worked on over the last little while. Some of these are hot off the press. I haven't shown the presentations before, so I thought I'd throw that in there.

And so yeah, using all our tools of the trade, but to make very evocative and quite resonant images. More crafted images, as opposed to just using the tools here. So these are projects from all over the world. This is Costa Rica, the one before was in Sydney. We've got one here, Sydney and Toronto. Yeah, each project is its own story.

Then, I would say service. This part of the metaphor doesn't fit perfectly, but it's the same idea. So this is the realm of animation. And I will play a couple of examples. This is now taking-- so it's not just knowing how to use a tool, it's not just crafting something out of it, now you're injecting the concept of idea and narrative. So now we're becoming, we're servicing our clients not just through our technical skills, but a lot more through our creative skills.

Of course, this applies to still images as well, still renderings. But it really comes to the fore in the animation realm. So I'll play an example of that.

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[BIRDS CHIRPING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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So that's an example of an animation, as I would say, very product-focused. But you can see here how one of the things that's occurring, hopefully, you can notice, is we're moving from-- in the beginning-- our work was very much at the service of the architect, in helping them visualize their vision, the creator. More and more as we go through the process of commodity to experience, we are moving closer to the end user.

So if you think about it, the architect is the designer. Then, what I've shown you now is-- and the previous still images-- is now thinking about working with the developer, but also beginning to think about the end user, their client. So we always talk about with our clients, that we're not creating images, animation, or experiences just for them. We're creating for their client.

Ultimately, most of our clients sell, lease, or somehow promote real estate. And our job is to make their clients, our clients' clients, fall in love with what they have created. So with moving further from the creator, in a sense, in terms of the architect, and closer to the end user.

So thinking about the kind of accessories, the kind of furniture, artwork, time of day, all the kind of experiences, the feelings we want them to have towards the content we're creating. And here, we're obviously, in the realm of animation, we're also evoking their sense of hearing, which is so powerful in a way, even though eyes are-- we always talk about what we put in front of our eyes, but really, there's two eyes and two ears. And sometimes our ears are portal into a much deeper kind of experience, a connection with what you're seeing.

So that was one example, project called Park Nova. It's in Singapore. Very high-end and bespoke. I'll show you another-- quite a different commercial animation to give you another example of this.

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- I want everybody to dance just like I said it. When I say hold yourself, I just want all of you, get ready to stop.

When I say stop, don't move. And when I say get it, I want all of y'all to [? boogie woogie ?] Hold it now. Boogie woogie. Stop. Boogie woogie.

Now when I say hold, yourself just now. I want all of you to [INAUDIBLE]. When I say stop, don't move a [INAUDIBLE].

When I say get it, everybody mess around. Everybody mess around. Hold yourself now. Hold yourself now. Hold yourself now. Mess around.

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ANDREI DOLNIKOV: Hopefully you watched that. So hopefully you can see again, it's not to say that we don't work with architects or anything like that, of course. We're still-- I'm an architect by training. That's our background. But more and more thinking about how the end user will relate to the content. That's the service plan.

And ultimately, this is the new frontier, the evolution or the next step in the evolution, or the revolution, if you want to call it, digital experience. I feel very much that this is the next step in the Arch-Viz industry's maturation. It's still a very, very young industry, but it's such an exciting time.

And this is a point, also, where we can really begin to look outside of our industry for inspiration. Once you think about experience, now you might be looking at, what do they do with the Super Bowl halftime show? What do they do in concerts? What do they do in product launches, cars, or automotive?

There's so much to draw upon. Theater, film production. What did they do in producing The Mandalorian? You can get ideas from that. So many things that have become points of inspiration for what we can bring into our industry.

And that's really what I want to share with you, a couple of examples of such. So just a little bit in-depth to understand the realm of digital experience. So this is kind of another quote from this same article. "Commodities, goods, and services are external to the buyer." That's what I've been trying-- and even though they're moving closer and closer to the buyer, they're still somewhat external. They're something that outside of you, it's a one way the content is there, and you're here, and you're consuming it, you're watching it.

Experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind of the individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual and even spiritual level. Depending on how resonant, how deep the experience is, how much it relates to the guts of who you are, how it makes you feel, does it make you feel hopeful? Does it make you feel nostalgic? Does it make you feel like you're yearning for happiness or to be with the people that you love?

There's so many feelings an experience can evoke. It can get deeper and deeper within your psyche. But the key thing is that it's unique to you in that moment. That is what the difference in experience and just consuming content.

And this is a great quote from the world of airlines. "The 'commodity mindset' is to think that a business is merely performing a function-- in our case, transporting people from A to B" for British Airways-- "on time, at the lowest possible price." For us, you could say, what is commodities? To be able to show a photo realistic depiction of the design of an architect.

If you think of our industry as that, we're stuck in the commodity mindset. It's also as a business, you might be stuck in a race to the bottom because someone might do it cheaper, some might do it faster. The more you move up the ladder from commodity to experience, the more what you're doing is differentiated and unique.

So example I'm sure you would have all noticed, the airlines, what they've done with their safety videos. That is very much a great example of going from something that's such a commodity in a way. They all have to, by law, tell you about the safety regulations and safety rules of how to fly. But they've taken this and now made it a whole experience.

I'm sure you've seen every line do it. This one here is quite, actually, abstract. I'll play it and talk about it over. I won't play the whole thing.

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- Hello, everyone, and thank you for your attention. It's time to get you ready for takeoff.

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: So it's like a deconstruction. Almost like a surrealist deconstruction--

- We know you have a lot of choices--

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: --of the flight experience.

- --so thanks for choosing American. We're happy to be your airline. Now, if you'll just follow along with me, we'll be on our way.

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: Very trippy, right? Who would have thought, like, safety videos. This is a great example where an industry--

- Welcome aboard. Before we depart, here are some important safety instruction.

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: [INAUDIBLE] as providing a commodity or basic service, to all of a sudden trying to become memorable.

- First things first, let's buckle those belts. Insert the metal end into the buckle.

ANDREI DOLNIKOV: [INAUDIBLE]

- US law prohibits smoking, including electronic cigarettes at any time. Tampering with, disabling, or destroying smoke detectors in the lavatories may result in a fine.

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ANDREI DOLNIKOV: You could actually see where they would have drawn these inspiration. You can see there's inspiration here from theater, from abstract art, from filmmaking. So rich in what's providing is because thinking about the experience.

OK. So now, of course-- I just thought I'd throw this one image in here-- of course, even the most basic image, at Binyan, one of our points of ethos, that even the most basic image should resonate on experience level. We want-- we actually talk internally like this. Say, we want the audience to hear the music in even a simple still image like this.

This is a project in Costa Rica. There's a certain romance, certain-- you can just feel it, even though it's static, you can feel the movie, you can feel the gentle warm breeze of summer. It resonates on a very deep level. So every type of content I believe that you create, should have an experience component. But when you get into actual surrounding immersive experience, it goes to a whole other level.

So just a little bit of, like, our own-- as I said-- this is an area we're very much focusing on expanding our capabilities in. So CGI rendering, 3D and 2D animation is what we've been focused on for many years now. But then, really thinking about the experience side of things, those things with the lower part of the circle, user experience design, sales-centric content experience, virtual reality, interactive immersion room concept. There's so many avenues that open up when you begin to think, what can we add to the campaigns of our clients in terms of creating unique, and memorable, and personal experiences for their audience, their clients?

So this is a bit of, also, from the same article in The Harvard Business Review, a little bit of a spectrum of the kind of experience you can go for. It doesn't always have to be theatrical and super entertaining. Can tend to the entertaining, or educational, or the aesthetic, or the escapist. Now, we're going to have a combo of quite a few of these.

But it's important to know what you're going for, so that you don't necessarily try to do everything at every stage. So I'm going to show you a couple of case studies of work that we've done that touches upon these points. So the first project is called Savyavasa in Jakarta. I'll show you, first, a little bit of the concept development what we did here.

So what you'll see in the actual case study is an immersion room, a large curved wall in the sales gallery of this particular development where the audience enters that space and they're surrounded by this curved wall, which at first, doesn't actually have anything projected onto it. The first thing that happens is there is-- actually, let me play the video and I'll come back to this concept stuff after. I think, instead of me talking, it will save time.

OK, let's see how this goes. So I'll play this. I'll talk over it at certain moments. This is the Savyavasa immersion room.

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So when you walk in, motion-activated cameras track your movement and project a watercolor artwork onto the floor. And it's a playful sort of experience at first. The watercolor is a motif in the brand, so it's very much based on that.

And people just have fun with it. One of the important points-- just pause it there-- is that is that they were so inundated with potential buyers in the sales gallery, so that our client actually asked us to make sure that there's something fun for their audience to experience and engage with in terms of engaging with their brand before they approach the agent. So this both forms a brand experience and an entertainment function, but also plays a very important point of function in their sales journey.

At a certain point, the agent essentially clicks a button. It's controlled by the client. And then it basically just-- rewind a little bit-- then, the projection kind of begins to turn into this projected wavy line artwork that goes throughout the whole floor and then activates the screen itself, which comes right after this. Turn up the volume here.

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So hopefully you see there-- it's very hard to portray like this, but when you're in that space and you are immersed in the experience, and the audio is coming from all around-- you see there's the six projectors up above, but the audio surround sound is also so powerful-- and other ones we actually scent and engaging other senses. But in this one-- so let me just go back.

This is the development of the storyboards, essentially. So we began with some of the concepts that are the brand ethos, developed mood boards about how that could portray both. We want to allude to the product, but this is much more of a aesthetic brand experience. And we're kind of describing what's going to happen at each stage, but it's very much still interspersed with, it's not just an experience that's completely superficially applied to product.

We want them to experience the product. We want them to experience in an abstracted, artistic, aesthetic way, and not just as a virtual tour, what they used to be called. So a few more of those slides of the concept development and the storyboard. So this was, yeah, this was just an incredible project to work on. A lot of this we had to deliver throughout COVID lockdown remotely. It was quite a thrill and a roller coaster ride, but it was really an amazing outcome.

OK, so that is Savyavasa project. That's the first project. The second project I want to share with you is Green Square in Sydney. Both of these we've won awards for, which is really gratifying to see kind of the fruit of your labor being recognized in the wider industry, and also, the awards are outside of architectural visualization, more mainstream advertising awards, which is great to see that recognition of not just us, but in the whole industry.

As I'm so humbled, people always say, I'm so humbled. I'm not humbled. I'm pumped. That's awesome. We won awards. That's great.

So humbled. Anyway. Humble brag. Please excuse me for that. So the next project is Green Square. Now, this has an immersion room component. It's not quite as grand as Savyavasa, but it has several other touch points, which are quite unique and have also opened up so many avenues beyond this in what we're doing, that it's really been a landmark project for us.

So just a couple of-- these are sort of inspiration points we're looking at in terms of the kind of experiences we wanted to draw upon and create. And hopefully you'll see resonance of these in this case study I'm about to play for you. So this is kind of a user-activated, graphic, responsive digital walls.

This is a kind of a field of light surround video. A digital model that's very much digitized. Again, user-activated projection mapping and so forth. So this is-- let me play for you-- oh, I'll come back to that, actually. This is some of the prototyping that we did at the time.

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Come back to that. Yeah, here we go.

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So I'll talk to this as it goes. So they came, the client came to us with, essentially, a floor plan and said, we want to create a series of experiences for our audience, or installations, as they called them in the beginning. And we began to really go through a process of discovering, what is the sales journey and how should these experiences be mapped to it and enhanced so they're not superficially applied, but rather, they are applied as a tool to get the audience from engaging and becoming aware of their brand to ultimately making a buying decision.

Again, we are trying to help our clients achieve their business objectives. So this is the first stage. And this is the outside, let's say, over here. And that was the little prototype I was showing you before, prototype in the studio, also during crazy COVID times. So when you walk by the actual sales gallery, the sales gear is located in a place where there's lots of other sales galleries.

So we wanted to make theirs quite unique. When you walk by it, we actually built a physical pixel wall that is responsive to a person as they move past it. It essentially responds to your movement and it creates, like, a memorable entertaining experience.

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Now, the whole idea, when you move through the door, there's a large digital screen on which the brand, which is Green Square, as those squares is projected, and when you approach it, the motion tracking devices latch onto your gestures. And people do either a beautiful, elegant dance or something funny and quirky. And essentially, this kind of pixel animation, pixel dance based on or your digital avatar appears, and then, actually, you can save it out and, like, when you enter your profile and you can share it in social media.

The next phase is the media table interactive model. So we wanted to do here is get away from just doing the model of the building. Part of it is because the precinct-- this project is part of a whole precinct. We needed to explain how it all works together.

So the audience, the user, let's say, hovers their hand over a particular point of interest, like transport. And then, that part of the model actually lights up. The model's mounted onto the screen. And accompanying information pops up on the walls around you.

So people really love being there in that space. Here's the immersion room. I'm not going to play the whole one. [INAUDIBLE] here.

But in this case, activated by approaching [INAUDIBLE]. Now you've Green Square. Surround sound audio. Sorry.

So again, it's a very uplifting and immersive experience [INAUDIBLE]. And the next part is quite cool. So this is a motion-triggered media wall. Which, as you'll see in a second-- so you're in this space. And you're the mouse. You're the cursor.

And so wherever you go, content relevant to, let's say, the letter L, comes up when you move towards the letter L. So light, lightness, innovation, and so forth. I see community and comfort. And people literally, you can have more than one person in the space, and people literally, like, walk around and they learn about it. It's quite engaging and a more user-driven kind of experience, all in the immersion room itself as well.

We'll just fast forward that. And then, ultimately, this is the final part, an interactive finish selector. So we've got the various options of the renderings there. And you have all the physical-- this is very powerful-- you have the physical samples in front of you, and you get to touch them, or, in COVID times, maybe you hover your hand over them. You actually have the tactile experience and you see the finish right there. It's not hypothetical. And then, when you select it, it updates in the rendering in front of you, which is good.

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OK, so that's Green Square. And that was actually the thing I was showing you before, here, was when we were actually prototyping. This is the little mini version of the pixel wall, as you can see, literally being prototyped in our office, which was a lot of fun. So let me see how I'm doing for time.

I might play the show reel at the end. Just a few-- sorry. I don't know if you can hear that construction noise behind me. Sounds like it's happening. Hopefully it's not too bad.

But the vision I wanted to portray to you today is the idea that we need to think of what we can do in a much broader way than, perhaps, we have thought to this day. Yes, we can portray architecture, yes, we can do that elegantly and with great craft. Yes, we can make it move. But ultimately, all those things together-- this is in no way negating that.

Everything builds on what was before. Everything incorporates. So you still need the incredible technical skill to use the tools that Autodesk and others have given us, that we can make-- and they're incredible. They blow our minds. Like, it's insane, right?

You still need the ability to curate the most simple scene, having the eye being that the interior designer, and the landscape architect, and the accessory curator all in one, and be able to create a space that feels right for the end audience. And you still need to be able to, of course, tell a great story through animation. All those ingredients are in there.

But if you really want to resonate and create that personal memorable experience for the product that you're visualizing, the digital experience space is really an incredibly exciting frontier to take all of the skills that we all possess. So it's like talking to you guys. This is-- excuse me-- what we have. And then, really bring our audience into that experience and bring the experience into their psyche, their emotion, their mind, and even their spirit.

And this really opens up the possibility of the future in such an exciting way. So I think we're really standing on the threshold of something incredibly exciting. I'm going to quickly show our immersive and digital experience show reel. Some of the examples are things that I would have shown you here.

This gives you a bit broader. And then I'll just finish on that and say farewell. So let's play the reel as the final thing.

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And yeah. And if you want to get in touch with me, this is how you do. adolnikov@binyan.com.au. I'm on LinkedIn. Binyan is on Instagram and on Facebook. Haven't logged into Facebook for a long time, but we're there.

And you can just make a call. We'd love to chat with anybody out there who's got ideas, or collaboration opportunities, or just have a schmooze. Always here. And I really appreciate your time, guys.

And now time for questions. Thank you very much. Andrei, over and out.