In the last couple of months, Enterprise Ireland funded Innovation as a Service project (IaaS project) have been experimenting with some disruptive technologies. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the lack of physical meetings, travel to different places to have study visits and staff exchanges became a huge challenge. 

Study visits are usually expensive, logistically challenging and difficult to organise. It requires a lot of time and resources to negotiate and agree visits to the target institutions, their staff and facilities. This is where VR (virtual reality) comes into play.

As part of the IaaS project, to improve effectiveness of study visits and staff exchanges the IaaS team have had the opportunity to create several virtual reality experiences in a number of labs in the North West of Ireland. In this virtual tours people can move through the facilities just by clicking on different points on their screens and also there are some highlighted tags with all necessary information for visitors interested to know more about equipment of the place.

During the project, the IaaS team have create several virtual tours to virtually "Walk" through some of the of the of labs in the North West of Ireland, like the WISAR Lab located in the CoLab Innovation Startup hub on the LYIT campus, Letterkenny, focused on introducing Industry 4.0 processes into small manufacturing businesses. The North West Regional College’s Product Design Centre Northern Ireland’s most exciting centre for entrepreneurs and local companies who want to create new products or enhance existing ones or Foodovation Centre is located in Derry a new state of the art research and development which offers a sanctuary to develop excellence in food Innovation, science and technology.

Virtual Study Visit can be used in a number of different ways. As study visit partners only need a computer or a mobile device to complete the tour, it’s possible to leave it open for a week and ask each participant to complete it in their own time and place or can be used in a video conferencing meetings like Zoom, Teams, Google Meet etc...

Visit the North West Regional College’s Product Design Centre!!