How Nexr brought seven of Armscor's strategic facilities to life through a suite of VR and AR experiences built for Africa's premier defence exhibition.
THE SITUATION
The Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) is the primary acquisition agency for the South African Department of Defence and other state entities. Armscor equips the armed forces with solutions that meet rigorous standards of effectiveness, manages the DOD's strategic capabilities, and drives the research and technological advancement that underpins safety and security across South Africa and the wider continent.
Africa Aerospace and Defence 2024 (AAD) is Africa's premier air and defence trade show. For Armscor, it represented an opportunity to present their capabilities to a concentrated audience of international stakeholders, procurement decision-makers, and industry peers in a single event.
How do you give an international audience a genuine sense of facilities spread across the country, from a stand on an exhibition floor?
Armscor needed an experience that could communicate the scale, sophistication, and range of their operations to a broad audience, including people with no prior familiarity with their specific sites or services. A static display would not do it. A conventional screen presentation would not do it. The solution had to be hands-on, accessible, and ready within 40 days.
Getting this right meant solving three challenges that pulled in different directions at the same time.
Communicating complex capabilities to a mixed audience: Armscor's work spans advanced research, defence acquisition, and highly technical R&D operations. Conveying that depth to an audience that included international stakeholders, non-specialist visitors, and senior decision-makers required an experience that could operate at multiple levels simultaneously, without losing clarity for any of them.
Designing for immersion and accessibility at the same time: The solution needed to be genuinely immersive for those who engaged with it fully, while remaining accessible to attendees who could not or would not use a headset. Building two experiences that felt equally compelling, in two different formats, from a single production process, was a significant design constraint.
A 40-day delivery timeline: The project required 360-degree filming across seven facilities and five locations, aerial and drone production, animation, infographic development, professional voiceover, and AR and VR development, all completed before the AAD 2024 opening.
The core decision was to treat the VR and AR outputs not as separate projects but as a single immersive experience designed from the outset to be accessible with or without a headset. That framing shaped every production and development choice that followed.
Nexr built a detailed VR tour covering seven Armscor facilities, including the Gerotek Test Facility and the Institute for Maritime Technology. Each site was presented through 360-degree views, purpose-built animation, and expert commentary that gave users an in-depth understanding of what each facility does and why it matters. The same content was then adapted into an AR application that delivered an equivalent experience for attendees who preferred not to use a headset, maintaining the immersive quality of the VR without requiring specialist equipment.
Nexr supplied Meta Quest headsets and VR pods to support the exhibition deployment. Trained facilitators were provided on the floor to guide attendees through the experiences, ensuring that each interaction landed with the intended impact rather than being left to chance.
Accessibility was not an afterthought. Designing the AR application in parallel with the VR tour, rather than adapting one from the other after the fact, meant both formats felt built with intention rather than compromised by constraint.
A corporate showreel, produced alongside the immersive experiences, was integrated directly into the exhibition. It gave attendees a cohesive visual overview of Armscor's full range of services and captured the character of each facility in a format suitable for both the event floor and future marketing use. The video worked as a draw for the stand and as context for visitors who had just completed the VR or AR experience.
At AAD 2024, the VR and AR experiences gave attendees a hands-on way to engage with Armscor's R&D capabilities that no physical display could have replicated within the same footprint. The immersive format drove active participation from stakeholders who would otherwise have received a brochure.
The corporate showreel produced as part of the project was designed for longevity, not just for AAD. Combined with the VR and AR applications, Armscor left the event with a set of content assets built to continue working across presentations, stakeholder engagements, and recruitment contexts well beyond the original exhibition.
Nexr's starting point is never the format. It is the audience and what they need to take away. For Armscor, the audience was broad, the subject matter was technically dense, and the setting gave people limited time and attention to give. The answer was an immersive experience that met people where they were, whether that was inside a VR headset or holding a phone.
The question that shaped the solution was not "what can we build in 40 days?" but "what does a senior international stakeholder need to experience to leave with a genuine understanding of what Armscor does?" Everything else followed from that.
Accessibility is part of the immersive brief: A VR experience that only works for a fraction of an exhibition audience is a partial solution. Designing the AR application in parallel with the VR tour, rather than as a fallback, meant neither format was compromised. Both were built to deliver the same quality of understanding through different means.
Production discipline is what makes tight timelines possible: Seven facilities, five locations, aerial footage, animation, two immersive formats, a corporate video, and trained facilitators at the event: none of that happens in 40 days without precise production planning from day one. Nexr brings that discipline into every project, not just the ones with aggressive deadlines.
Assets built for a single event should survive it: An immersive experience that retires when the exhibition ends is a missed investment. The VR and AR experiences Nexr built for Armscor were designed as durable assets from the outset. Their continued use beyond AAD 2024 was not a happy accident. It was the plan.
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