Metsä Group - Nemus Futurum
An educational holistic XR experience
Nemus Futurum is Metsä Group’s interactive and comprehensive visitor experience showcasing sustainable forest management and the Finnish forests in a completely new way through cutting edge technology used at an actual location.
At Nemus Futurum guests are guided through sustainable Finnish forest management, sustainable use of forests, forest nature and bioproducts. Visitors will also experience how sustainable forest management has an effect on the climate and forest biodiversity.
In 2023 together with Dentsu and Metsä Group we completely redesigned the experience to better suit the always evolving key principles of sustainable forestry.
Immersive learning
At Nemus Futurum visitors are guided through all significant stages of an 80-year forest cycle. All visitors are provided an iPad with a bespoke app installed at the beginning of the tour that helps contextualize both the environment and support the narration of the tour guides.
The app uses various methods such as GPS tracking and Augmented Reality to provide a curated digital experience in the awe-inspiring forest setting of Nemus Futurum.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality plays a significant part in the application. We utilize AR to show our users what would otherwise be invisible.
A sustainably managed forest contains many positive features that a layman will not see with the naked eye. Through AR we are able to visualize these and present the user with a more comprehensive, fact-based storyline.
Visitors are shown various stages of the forest life cycle - moving forward in time so to speak. The visitors get to explore the rapid growth stage, learn about forestry versus agriculture in use of land, see how nutrients travel onto a tree and the storage of carbon dioxide and finally seeing how 100% of the tree is utilized in various products.
We built our AR scenes with native C++ development as well as with Apple's new cutting edge Reality Composer toolkit - the same one used for upcoming Apple Vision Pro apps.
Dynamic GPS tracking
The Nemus Futurum visitor app is completely contextual in relation to the multiple locations (stages of sustainable forestry) the tour features. This required that the app was designed as an extension of the tour guide and restricting more free-form use. While at the tour the app uses GPS tracking to initiate content.
When people are moving from one destination to another the app locks all content into a sort of ‘transit mode’ and when the device’s GPS location is within a certain radius it unlocks the content for the aforementioned location.
Results
Over the course of the 2023 season, Nemus Futurum has garnered an overall visitor rating of 4.68/5.
Visitors have described Nemus Futurum as an awe-inspiring tour and one that "everyone should get to experience".
A recurring theme in visitor comments is that getting to learn about sustainable forest management in an actual forest elevates their learning to a new level.
And indeed, this was what we set out to accomplish.
It is safe to say that Nemus Futurum truly is a new way of learning through an immersive digitally-driven physical experience.