A Virtual Expo Website for the 2020 World Manufacturing Convention

The brief

The 2020 World Manufacturing Convention needed a virtual expo that visitors could explore online rather than simply browse. The organisers wanted a 3D city — a navigable environment where attendees move through the expo VR-style, discovering exhibitors and zones as if walking a real venue — reaching an audience far larger than any physical hall in Hefei could hold.

What we did

We built a virtual expo website structured as an explorable 3D city. Visitors navigate the environment VR-style, moving through streets and spaces and turning to look around as they go, with exhibition zones laid out across the city for them to approach and explore. Everything runs online in the browser, so attendees could join from anywhere without special hardware or downloads.

We designed the city's layout to guide visitors through the expo while leaving them free to roam, and optimised the 3D scenes so navigation stayed smooth for a large concurrent audience. Because a convention of this scale draws enormous interest, we built the experience to welcome a broad online crowd and keep the walkthrough responsive as visitor numbers grew. We treated the 3D city as a designed destination in its own right, with a sense of scale and place that made exploring the expo feel like an event rather than a web page — an environment visitors wanted to move through and return to.

The result

The virtual expo opened the 2020 World Manufacturing Convention to a far wider audience than a physical venue could reach, drawing well over a million cumulative visits across the run. By turning the convention into an explorable 3D city, we let attendees anywhere walk the expo, find exhibitors, and experience the event — extending a Hefei-based convention to a genuinely national and international online audience far beyond the physical venue.