IDMR / Work / Unreal & VR
Project · Real-time experience · ICAO

Unreal & VR.

A body of real-time and virtual reality experiences developed for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to communicate the future of aviation — future airports, urban air mobility, eVTOL museum displays, working hangars, and in-flight cabin experiences. Six pieces, two engines, one consistent visual language.

Sector
AerospaceAviation · Mobility
Client
ICAOUN civil aviation
Output
6 pieces3 real-time · 3 VR
Stack
Unreal + UnityRhino · Adobe
About the project

Six experiences. One client. Two engines.

This page collects the real-time and virtual reality work produced for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — a UN agency that needed to communicate the future of aviation to government delegations, member-state representatives, and the public. The constraint: complex policy and infrastructure topics had to land in under three minutes of attention from a person standing in front of a screen or wearing a headset, not from a person reading a 200-page report.

The six pieces split into two groups. Three are linear real-time walkthroughs rendered out of Unreal Engine — a future airport, an urban air mobility skyline, and an eVTOL aircraft on display in a museum environment — designed to play on screens at conferences and on the ICAO website. Three are fully interactive VR experiences built to be worn with a headset — a working hangar, an in-flight aircraft cabin, and a piloted urban air mobility tour — designed to be walked around inside.

3D modelling for all six in Rhinoceros. The three real-time walkthroughs were built in Unreal Engine using a mix of custom assets and marketplace content, scored, edited and rendered by Martín Rico. The three VR experiences were built in Unity; two of them — Airplane and Urban Air Mobility — were developed in collaboration with BMU Labs (Québec), with Martín producing the 3D content and working alongside the Unity team. The Hangar VR experience was developed solo.

Group 01 · Unreal Engine

Real-time walkthroughs.

Three linear pieces built in Unreal Engine. The brief on each was the same: a non-specialist viewer should understand what's being shown and why it matters inside the first thirty seconds, and the experience should carry on rewarding attention for another two minutes after that. Rhinoceros for the original 3D content, Unreal for the environment build, marketplace assets used selectively for context (vegetation, characters, ambient props) and clearly subordinate to the custom-modelled hero objects.

UNREAL · FUTURE AIRPORT
Future of Aviation · airport walkthrough A near-future commercial airport — long curving terminal building, mixed traditional and eVTOL traffic, transparent passenger walkways above the apron. Built to communicate the infrastructure case for next-generation airport design. 2m24s with audio.
UNREAL · URBAN AIR MOBILITY
Urban Air Mobility · skyline tour A speculative city skyline organised around vertical landing pads and dense vertical infrastructure — mountains on the horizon, eVTOL traffic between buildings, the camera flying through it from the perspective of a passenger arriving in town. 2m23s with audio.
UNREAL · MUSEUM PIECE
eVTOL Museum · object as exhibit A single eVTOL aircraft staged as a museum exhibit — sculptural lighting, fractured display platform, in-universe specification panel on a screen alongside. Designed for use on a single large display at events. 1m35s with audio.
Group 02 · Unity · VR

Worn, not watched.

Three pieces built for VR headsets — designed to be experienced from inside, not viewed on a flat screen. The clips below are screen captures taken from inside the headset, with all the limitations that implies: the geometry is optimised for real-time rendering at a stable framerate rather than for 2D screenshots, and the captures lose the spatial sense that's the entire point of putting the headset on in the first place. Take them as a record of what was built, not as a substitute for the actual experience.

Two of the three — Airplane and Urban Air Mobility — were developed in collaboration with BMU Labs (Québec). Martín modelled the 3D content in Rhinoceros and worked alongside the BMU Unity team on the in-headset experience. The Hangar piece was developed solo.

VR · HANGAR · SOLO
VR Hangar Experience · solo build A working aircraft hangar with mechanics, tools, and a parked aircraft. Designed to let the user walk around an aircraft at scale and look up at the structure above. 49s screen capture.
VR · AIRPLANE · × BMU LABS
VR Airplane Experience · with BMU Labs Inside the cabin of a commercial aircraft in flight — passenger seats, cabin lighting, window views. The interactive elements are out of frame in the screen capture; the experience is designed for the user to look around naturally inside the cabin. 48s screen capture.
VR · URBAN AIR MOBILITY · × BMU LABS
VR Urban Air Mobility · with BMU Labs Sitting inside an eVTOL aircraft as it moves through a vertical-mobility cityscape — a VR translation of the linear Unreal piece in the section above. 23s screen capture.
YouTube · Public-facing edits

As published.

Two of the Unreal walkthroughs as they were published on ICAO's public-facing channels — final colour, final cuts, final audio mix. Embedded below directly from YouTube.

YOUTUBE · ICAO PUBLISHED
ICAO · published edit Public-channel cut.
YOUTUBE · ICAO PUBLISHED
ICAO · published edit Public-channel cut.

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