Like many of you, we entered into a brand new decade with excitement for we had lined up for the year, a clear direction, and plans to execute. However, come mid-March, all of us in North America experienced the first serious wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing us all to reevaluate our priorities and adapt to this brand new challenge.
2020 has been a long eventful year to say the least. From transitioning our whole Yulio team into an indefinite period of remote work to setting up new processes and virtual meetings to ensure we can continue communicating well, this year has been unlike any other. However, in the midst of all this chaos, our team has continued to expand and refine Yulio as we work towards our goal of being the best mobile VR presentation tool for business. And this year, we’re proud to have released 7 brand new features for our users to use in their VR projects.
Today, we’ll be recapping and highlighting our 2020 feature releases and how you can use them in your projects today - let’s dive in!
1.2D Perspective Renderings
We kicked off this year by introducing a brand new capability for our Yulio Jump for SketchUp and CET Designer users. Prior to this update, Jump users were able to render their scenes into full-blown VR experiences with just a few clicks. While our Yulio Jump users primarily use our cloud-based rendering platform to create VR projects, some of our users shared with our team how they hoped for an additional feature that could produce 2D renderings. And after hearing your feedback, our 2D Perspective Rendering feature was born.
2. Enhanced Material Tags
Just before we began our period of remote work, we released our Yulio Jump for SketchUp Enhanced Material Tags. These material tags are add-on enhancements that allow our users to further elevate their projects when rendering with Yulio Jump. We created 17 Yulio material tags to give Jump users a simple way to get one step closer to photorealism while still enjoying all the benefits that come with cloud rendering. All you have to do is copy and paste our material tag into the material label field, hit render, and wait a little bit to get your newly enhanced rendered image.
.png?width=849&name=Screenshot%20(1).png)
3. Download Scene
Our Download Scene feature was one of the most requested features and we were so excited to share and deliver what our users were asking for. Download Scene allows you to download individual scenes from any VR project in your Yulio account to your computer or device. This feature makes it easy to edit and change your scenes in your project without needing to re-do your hotspots and other added Yulio project features. What you now can do is download your individual scenes, make the edits, and re-upload it to Yulio for further review, giving you greater control and flexibility to make the smaller minute changes.
4. Autogenerate Hotspot and Floorplan
Our team spent the early months of the pandemic working on supporting and optimizing our platform to help our users continue building projects with Yulio and rendering images with Yulio Jump. Among overall improvements to the quality of the finished image, lighting, and 2D perspective rendering, we also added 2 brand new features to Yulio Jump for CET. Our latest updates include the ability to automatically generate a floorplan from your scenes as well as autogenerating hotspots, helping you to link your scenes together with just a single click.
5. External Links
External Links is just another feature that was largely inspired by our Yulio users and their feedback on how to improve our platform. With this feature, you can include any URL in your text and image hotspots. The best part of External Links is how incredibly versatile it is. Whether you’re looking to draw more traffic to your website or provide further spec information about a particular product, your clients will be redirected to your attached URL directly from your VR project.
Here are a few more ideas on how you can use External Links:
- Linking your Contact Us page during a pitch
- Including a link to a campaign-specific landing page that provides your clients with more information
- Link out to additional resources like Whitepapers or related blog posts
6. Video Hotspots
One of our most exciting 2020 feature releases is our latest addition to our hotspot library - Video Hotspots! Basic Video Hotspots allows you to link your videos from YouTube directly to your VR projects. If you have a brief welcome message about your company mission and goals or an introduction for a brand new product, Video Hotspots allow you to tell your visual story without needing to flip in and out of VR. However, if you’re looking for greater flexibility with adding videos into your Yulio projects, please contact our team to learn more about our Premium Video Hotspots.
7. LiveChat
And last but not least, we’re pleased to share with you our latest feature that we have just welcomed onto our platform - introducing our Yulio LiveChat integration!
For those unfamiliar with LiveChat, this software gives you a way to engage, communicate, and assist your clients with instant messaging. Now with our Yulio LiveChat integration, connecting with your clients has never been easier. Whether your clients have questions about your VR project or a prospect is looking for further information or a way to contact your team, viewers can now directly chat with your sales team or agents through your LiveChat account. Plus, since you can set your account to enable notifications, your team will never miss an opportunity to connect with your viewers remotely.
Yulio in 2020
While 2020 certainly came with its own unique challenges, we’re proud to create and share these exciting new features with our Yulio users. We would like to also like to take this time to thank all of you for your feature suggestions and recommendations this year. All of these features were heavily influenced by your feedback and input so if you have any other ideas on what you hope to see on our Yulio platform, always feel free to reach out to our team. We hope these features were able to support you in creating stunning immersive presentations, and we look forward to doing more in 2021!
