This 3D aircraft configurator makes buying and selling easier.
Cirrus Aircraft manufactures jets and piston airplanes for personal aviation and businesses. Cirrus wanted to create an experience that works for customers by visualizing all aesthetics options, in any combination in realtime and that supports the sales team in keeping track of these choices. We have designed and developed a 3D aircraft configurator for Cirrus Aircraft, together with Mirari, Frodo Schering and Innouveau.
The challenge
When purchasing an aircraft, customers make many choices about the aesthetics of their plane. There are exterior paint schemes, paint colors, cabin colors and seat layouts to pick from. How can Cirrus help their customers make informed choices without having to spend a lot of time explaining the possibilities and creating custom renderings?
At the same time, Cirrus salespeople need to keep track of those choices until they have been finalized. Customers can change their minds several times over the course of many months. It’s very easy to lose track of the final pick. And supporting customers with these choices is very time consuming.
For many customers, the website is an important place to start experiencing the product and the brand. A well-designed 3D configurator elevates this experience in many ways.
The Discovery
Before jumping head-first into a project of this scale, we started with a discovery phase. Discovery is the process where we try to uncover all the details of the project. Some things are obvious but other requirements might be hidden deep down in the organization and in the minds of the client. By asking the right questions we can greatly reduce risks of budget and planning issues in the long run.
Our solution
The 3D experience brings it all together. A 3D exploration area where you can take a virtual guided tour around the planes. A user friendly, online 3D configurator with realistic lighting and materials to help visualize colors, lighting and materials. And a direct connection to Salesforce CRM to keep track of all the prospects and choices for the salesteam.
Exploring
There is so much to learn and discover about the Cirrus aircraft. Including all that information in the configurator would create a major distraction. Within the configurator you need to focus on the task at hand: building your dream plane!
This is why we have added an exploration module as a separate experience. This module provides a guided tour in and around the 3D models of the planes. It highlights features such as safety, engines, interiors and the dashboard. We use the same 3D models for this purpose and enhance them which clickable hotspots and 3D animations to explain all there is to know about the aircraft.
3D configurator
The 3D configurator has been designed in collaboration with Mirari and Frodo Schering. It contains two sections: the configurator and an explore section. The explore section gives you a guided tour through each of the four planes while the configurator enables you to work with the planes. In both sections, the user is guided through the experience and never overwhelmed with too much information. You can use all functions on large screens and on your mobile. You can create an account and save your personalized design document while you’re on the go. Any configuration that you’ve saved or shared will end up in an area called “My Hangar” where you can go back and retrieve your favorites.
Innovative use of Sketchfab
We’ve developed the latest version of the configurator together with Innouveau. We’re using the Sketchfab 3D engine to visualize the aircraft because it’s easy to use and looks fantastic. Besides using the standard features of the 3D engine, such as controlling the materials or showing and hiding parts, we’ve added many innovations such as in-engine animations, custom hotspots and enhanced camera movements.
Salesforce CRM integration
The capability to save configurations, share them with friends and create design documents is powered by the Salesforce CRM integration. This integration also provides special capabilities for sales people, such as browsing configurations of all of their customers and creating signable documents.
Scalable and maintainable
As the Cirrus airplanes evolve, new features and paints are released onto the market. Even a complete design overhaul of the piston aircraft has happened. The configurator has the capabilities to show private previews of yet-to-be-released features to selected customers. At the same time it will show last-season aircraft if you’ve stored them in your account. Managing multiple versions of the aircraft over a longer period of time is a key factor for this configurator to be successful in the long run.