A showroom you do not have to travel to

eHealth Arena gathers welfare technology in one place so that municipalities, care providers and procurement staff can see what exists and how it is used. A physical showroom does that well for anyone who can get to Kalmar. Everyone else reads a datasheet.

These products are also unrewarding to photograph. A sensor that reports a fall is a white plastic square. A brief with printed conductive traces looks like a brief. What matters is not the object but where it sits, in whose home, next to what else, and none of that survives a product shot on a white background.

The audience is care staff and municipal buyers, opening a link on a work laptop or a phone, on whatever network the building has. That one fact set every budget on the project.

Roughly 1,500 polygons per instrument. Textures at 1024 pixels square. Rooms larger, but not by much. Everything delivered as glTF binary, with the contents of each room packed into shared texture atlases so a scene arrives as a handful of files rather than a hundred.

The heaviest thing a browser can be asked to do is calculate light. Shadow casting lights in real time are what turn a scene into a fan running at full speed, and the usual escape, one flat ambient light and no shadows, is exactly why most web 3D looks like a photograph of an empty room. Neither option was acceptable, so the light had to come from somewhere else.

The rooms stand on two circular stages that rotate, in darkness, with a lamp above whichever room is turned towards you. It is a theatre set, and it was chosen as one. With everything around it black, the pool of light does the work an environment would otherwise have to do, and the room being looked at is the only room that has to be lit at all.

Each room was then lit properly in Cinema 4D, with area lights and global illumination, the way a room would be lit for a still frame. Octane baked the result onto the materials: albedo, ambient occlusion, the lighting itself for each of the three lit rooms, metalness, roughness, reflection, opacity, and a separate shadow pass per lit room. Twelve maps per scene.

What reaches the browser is a set of images. The soft shadow under the bed, the falloff up the wall, the warmth on one side of a cabinet, all of it is already painted on. The browser draws textures and calculates no light at all, which is why it runs on a phone.

Everything in a room shares one atlas. On the left is flat colour, the surfaces as they would look with no light in the world at all. On the right is the same atlas after the bake, with the lighting, the ambient occlusion and the shadows already resolved into it.

The circle near the centre of both is the floor of the stage. The dark shapes across it are the shadows of the furniture, painted into the texture, permanent, and free.

There was no CAD. Manufacturers publish photographs, so every instrument was modelled from reference images and checked back against them: a blood pressure cuff and its monitor, a chest-worn sensor that reports arrhythmia, an absorbent brief with printed sensor traces and a clip-on transmitter, a watch, a floor scale, a room camera, a medicine dispenser.

About a fifth of the project went on developing the look, half on the instruments, and the rest on the rooms. Three domestic rooms on one stage, two clinical rooms on the other.

5 rooms across 2 rotating stages
~30 welfare technology instruments
glTF binary, real-time budgets
~1,500 polygons per instrument · 1024×1024 textures
12 baked maps per scene, shared texture atlases
Runs on desktop and mobile browsers

The showroom is public and in use. The client has since asked for more products to be added, and for another room in the care environment, which is the only review of a delivery that means anything.

The showroom was commissioned by eHealth Arena and produced by Markus.se. Shader Development Studio built the platform. Mareld Productions supplied the rooms, the instruments and the lighting.