Neotion, a technology company specializing in IoT systems, faced the challenge of demonstrating the modularity and power of their smart home devices in a way that was both memorable and easily understood.
Our solution was to create an interactive 3D architectural model of a typical suburban house, allowing visitors to explore various rooms—such as the kitchen, lounge, nursery, main bedroom, bathroom, backyard garden, and garage—while interacting with the IoT devices within these spaces. This virtual experience was paired with a physical wall installation, where real-world devices were connected to the virtual model. As visitors navigated the virtual house and touched devices, the corresponding real-world devices lit up or activated, demonstrating the seamless connection between Neotion’s virtual IoT ecosystem and the real world.
Neotion is a technology company specialising in IoT systems, with their Neohome platform offering a modular suite of smart home devices covering security, energy management, lighting, climate control, and automated access across every room of a domestic property.
The challenge they brought to ex1t.one in 2015 was a familiar one for technology companies operating at the leading edge of a category that is still gaining mainstream adoption: how do you demonstrate a product whose real value only becomes apparent when it is experienced holistically, rather than examined device by device.
A conventional product demonstration – devices on a table, a presenter explaining features – would have conveyed the technical specification of the Neohome system without communicating what actually matters: the feeling of a home that responds intelligently to its occupants, and the confidence that comes from understanding how each part of the system connects to every other part. ex1t.one’s solution was to build that experience directly – a fully interactive virtual home, room by room, connected in real time to the physical devices themselves.
Neotion
Table of Contents
An Interactive 3D Suburban Home: Room by Room Through the IoT Ecosystem
The centrepiece of the Neohome experience was an interactive 3D architectural model of a typical suburban house – a complete property rendered in detail across every domestic space: kitchen, lounge, nursery, main bedroom, bathroom, backyard garden, and garage. Visitors navigated this virtual house freely, moving between rooms and interacting with the Neotion IoT devices present in each space.
The house was designed to feel immediately recognisable and contextually grounded – a real home, not an abstract showroom. This was a deliberate decision. Smart home technology is often showcased in futuristic or clinical environments, subtly distancing potential customers from the product by implying it belongs to a world they do not yet inhabit. The suburban house model placed the Neohome system in a domestic context that visitors could directly map onto their own lives, making the value of each device and each room-specific application immediately personal rather than aspirational.
Each room was populated with Neotion devices relevant to that space – the kitchen with energy monitoring and appliance automation, the nursery with environmental sensors and monitoring, the garage with access control and security – giving visitors a complete and coherent picture of how the system operated across an entire property rather than as a collection of isolated products.
Virtual Meets Physical: Real Devices Responding to Virtual Interactions
The defining feature of the Neohome experience was the real-time connection between the virtual 3D model and a physical wall installation displaying the actual Neotion devices. As visitors navigated the virtual house and interacted with on-screen devices, the corresponding physical devices on the wall lit up or activated in direct response, demonstrating the speed, reliability, and seamless connectivity of the Neohome system through observable, tangible behaviour rather than description.
This physical-virtual bridge was technically precise: the response latency between a visitor’s interaction in the virtual model and the corresponding activation of the physical device was fast enough to feel immediate, which was critical to the demonstration’s credibility. Any perceptible lag between the virtual interaction and the physical response would have undermined the system’s core claim of seamless connectivity. The absence of that lag, experienced directly, communicated Neotion’s engineering quality more convincingly than any specification sheet could.
The wall installation itself was designed as a clear, legible display of the full device ecosystem – a physical taxonomy of the Neohome range that visitors could see in its entirety whilst simultaneously experiencing its behaviour through the virtual model. Together, the two elements gave visitors both an overview of the system’s contents and a lived understanding of how it worked.
Making IoT Tangible: Intuitive Design for a Complex Technology
IoT systems present a specific communication challenge: the value they deliver is distributed across dozens of individual components, each modest in isolation, but collectively capable of transforming how a home functions. Communicating this aggregated value to visitors who may be encountering connected home technology for the first time requires an experience that is intuitive enough to be immediately navigable, whilst being comprehensive enough to leave visitors with a complete understanding of what the system can do.
The Neohome experience was designed around this tension. The 3D house model provided a navigational logic that required no instruction – everyone understands the layout of a suburban home, and moving from room to room is an inherently intuitive act. The IoT devices were introduced within that familiar spatial logic rather than in an abstract product hierarchy, allowing visitors to discover the system’s capabilities through natural curiosity rather than guided demonstration.
The result was an experience that received consistent praise for making IoT technology tangible and approachable, and that successfully demonstrated both the reliability of the Neohome system and the breadth of what it could offer a household, generating strong visitor engagement and measurably enhanced trust in Neotion’s technology among the audiences who experienced it.
- Goals:
◦ Showcase Neotion’s IoT system modularity and speed.
◦ Create a seamless connection between virtual smart homes and physical devices.
◦ Enhance user engagement through intuitive design and real-world responsiveness. - Production:
◦ Developed a 3D architectural model of a suburban home with various interactive rooms showcasing IoT devices (kitchen, lounge, nursery, garden, garage, etc.).
◦ Created a physical wall installation where real-world devices mirrored the interactions within the virtual home.
◦ Designed real-time lighting and device activation features to demonstrate the speed and modularity of Neotion’s IoT system. - Results:
◦ High visitor engagement with seamless interactions between virtual and physical devices.
◦ Demonstrated the IoT system’s reliability and speed, enhancing user trust in Neotion’s technology.
◦ Received praise for the innovative approach to making IoT tangible and intuitive.
Related Interactive Product and Technology Experiences
Explore more interactive product and technology experiences from ex1t.one:
- Hexagon 270° Immersive Theatre – Real-time interactive showroom for Hexagon industrial technology in the Netherlands
- LG Multi V Stage Presentation – Pepper’s Ghost product demonstration adopted globally by LG’s Korean headquarters
- Inditex Global Marketing Platform – Real-time data-driven interactive platform deployed from Arteixo to worldwide
ex1t.one’s Approach to Interactive Product Experience Design
ex1t.one designs interactive experiences for technology companies and product manufacturers that need to communicate complex systems in ways that are immediately understood and genuinely engaging. Whether the challenge is a product too large to put on a stage, a technology too distributed to demonstrate in isolation, or a system whose value only becomes apparent when experienced as a whole, our approach is the same: design the experience that makes the product’s value undeniable rather than the presentation that describes it.
The Neohome project is a clear example of this approach – a virtual environment that gave visitors ownership of the demonstration, combined with physical device activation that made the technology’s behaviour observable and credible in real time. The design principle throughout was that visitors should leave the experience with a felt understanding of what the Neohome system could do for their lives, not just an intellectual awareness of its features.
For further context on interactive experience design for technology products and IoT systems, visit the Interactive & Digital Media team at BIMA, the British Interactive Media Association.