Futurebuild Belgium 2025
Jürgen Van Hulst - Saint-Gobain Solutions Benelux
Acoustic Comfort in Educational Buildings
Overview
IMAGINE is an immersive virtual reality application developed for SG Solutions Benelux to support specification activities in the education sector. It enables architects, consultants, contractors, and public stakeholders to experience the impact of Saint-Gobain solutions on daylight quality, visual comfort, and acoustic comfort before a building is constructed or renovated.
Built on the XR-Platform, IMAGINE combines realistic virtual environments, advanced spatial audio, and interactive product exploration to translate technical performances into meaningful user benefits, helping stakeholders make more informed design and investment decisions.
Why IMAGINE?
Educational building projects increasingly require evidence of occupant well-being, learning conditions, and acoustic quality. IMAGINE addresses several key challenges:
- Making comfort tangible by allowing stakeholders to directly experience visual and acoustic performances instead of relying solely on technical data.
- Supporting specification decisions through realistic comparisons between different Saint-Gobain solution packages.
- Helping secure higher-value specifications by demonstrating the relationship between product performance and occupant comfort.
- Positioning Saint-Gobain as a trusted knowledge partner for educational building projects.
- Creating memorable customer interactions during meetings, workshops and events.
Key Features
- Immersive classroom and sports hall environments representative of modern educational buildings.
- Visual comfort demonstrations showcasing the impact of glazing configurations, daylight availability and quality of views.
- Acoustic comfort simulations allowing users to compare different ceiling, wall and insulation solutions using spatial audio rendering.
- Interactive product exploration with technical information, samples and solution descriptions accessible directly in VR.
- Guide-controlled experiences enabling SG specifiers to lead engaging demonstrations and discussions.
- Multi-user collaboration for shared immersive sessions between customers and Saint-Gobain teams.
- Hand-tracking interactions for intuitive and controller-free user experiences
Three modes of use:
- IMAGINE Solo: single-user experience for trade shows, showrooms and autonomous demonstrations.
- IMAGINE Local: guided multi-user experience with all participants located in the same room.
- IMAGINE Remote: guided multi-user experience connecting participants across different locations.
Demonstration of the IMAGINE Solo version: Video
Usage scenarios
- Specification meetings: compare multiple construction solutions and discuss their impact on occupant comfort.
- Architect engagement: help architects and consultants understand how design decisions influence acoustic and visual quality.
- Local government and school stakeholders presentations: demonstrate the value of investing in higher-performing educational environments.
- Trade shows and events: provide visitors with an impactful immersive experience highlighting Saint-Gobain expertise.
- Internal training: educate Saint-Gobain teams on solution benefits and customer value propositions.
How IMAGINE drives customer engagement
- Transforms technical specifications into lived experiences, making customer discussions more concrete and persuasive.
- Facilitates understanding of occupant comfort, a key decision criterion for educational building projects.
- Creates immersive and memorable interactions that differentiate Saint-Gobain from traditional product presentations.
- Strengthens the role of SG specifiers by providing a powerful storytelling and demonstration tool.
- Supports cross-BU solution selling by combining glazing, ceilings, wall systems and insulation solutions within a single immersive experience.
