As the Al Wasl Dome project continued to go from strength to strength and involved multiple contributors and creative teams, it became clear it was critical to develop a tool to provide content teams, clients and collaborators with the ability to visualise what their creative visions would look like on the dome.

Expo Dubai 2020 engaged the Bild team to develop a photo-real Virtual Reality visualiser within Unreal Engine, taking the content workflows we had already created and making them accessible to the teams, allowing them to view the projection content in a 1:1 virtual setup of the dome.

Created in Unreal Engine as a stand-alone application, the user can navigate around the inside of the dome across different times of day, swap out projection content, adjust content settings, add various FX (such as pyros and smoke) and even export the simulation by rendering it into a 360 movie - ready to be viewed on YouTube by all stakeholders involved. The clients were thrilled that they now had access to see their visions come to life and this gave them the confidence to commission their content for such a large scale canvas.