A 360° VR film of Lenzerheide, shot at 8K/60fps for VR headsets, with a 4K 2D cutdown for screens and social media. Designed to make a destination's atmosphere tangible in seconds.
Destination marketers, event organisers and tourism boards who need visitors to feel a place before they decide to visit — at trade fairs, on VR headsets, or embedded online.
Capturing the feeling of a place — not just showing it. Story, pacing and sound needed to align with how people actually experience VR at an event, in the seconds before attention drifts.
A film that works both as a full VR headset experience and as a shorter 2D cutdown — one production, multiple deployment channels, still in active use.
An operating theatre where no one is ever operated on. Where the surgery of tomorrow is tested, trained and researched instead, without a single patient in the room. The OR-X Virtual Tour Zurich makes this place explorable: OR-X is the tenth operating theatre at Balgrist University Hospital, and the only one dedicated entirely to research and training.
OR-X stands for Operating Room X, the Translational Center for Surgery at Balgrist University Hospital. The X stands for the number ten, since OR-X is the hospital's tenth operating theatre. But it also stands for the potential of this digitised research infrastructure. The centre opened in August 2023, inside the hospital's former air-raid shelter, a place with history, now housing innovation.
At its core is a fully equipped operating theatre with an adjoining skills lab. Training and research take place without any direct patient contact, using 3D-printed models, simulators and body donations. The project was initiated by Prof. Dr. med. Mazda Farshad, Medical Director of Balgrist University Hospital. As a strategic infrastructure of University Medicine Zurich (UMZH) and part of Switzerland's national roadmap for research infrastructures, OR-X is today a national reference point for surgical innovation.
The reception of OR-X, the starting point of the virtual tour.
Swiss and European hospitals have faced significant cost pressure for years. Tariffs for many procedures barely cover actual costs, and spare capacity is increasingly scarce. What used to be a given, an operating theatre reserved solely for training, research and testing new equipment, is something few hospitals can still afford on their own. That is exactly the gap OR-X fills.
Rather than every hospital maintaining its own test infrastructure, hospitals from across Switzerland and Europe now rent OR-X's facilities for training, for research projects, and for trialling new surgical technology. Medical technology companies also use OR-X to present new devices to a specialist audience under realistic conditions. What began as a single institution has become a shared, nationally used infrastructure.
The brief came from Robin Ströhle, Head of Business Development at OR-X. Detail work and ongoing coordination ran together with Navin Joshi, Marketing & Communications Specialist. Two contacts, two roles, and a collaboration that ran smoothly from the first enquiry to the final revision.
The biggest design requirement: the virtual tour needed to sit seamlessly within OR-X's existing web presence, not feel like an added tool, but a natural part of the brand. The complete corporate design was carried over: colour palette, typography, the distinctive diagonal element from the logo. The small navigation thumbnails could not be solved with any off-the-shelf approach either, Avocado360 built them from scratch so that every detail of the OR-X Virtual Tour Zurich matched the corporate design.
A second challenge was underestimated and, in the end, more demanding than expected: the tour's cover image. It needed to work on every device, from a small smartphone screen to a large desktop monitor, without losing impact. This adaptation was developed entirely in-house, with custom responsive treatment for every format.
OR-X's colour palette, typography and diagonal logo element carried through fully into the tour.
Purpose-built navigation thumbnails, because no off-the-shelf solution matched the corporate design.
Custom-built adaptation so the cover works from smartphone to large desktop screen.
A complete experience on the Meta Quest 3, including fully functioning info windows in VR.
The OR-X Virtual Tour Zurich covers eleven panoramas across two floors, each piece of medical equipment with its own info window, from the KUKA LBR Med robotic arm to the GE ultrasound unit. An interactive floor plan allows visitors to switch between floors, with no login or app required. For trade fair use, the tour also runs fully offline, as a Progressive Web App and as a standalone experience on the VR headset.
Open the tour directly: vt.avocado360.com/OR-X. Also available as a VR experience on the Meta Quest 3.
The tour has already passed its first major real-world test: a trade fair appearance for OR-X. Offline capability, VR mode and responsive design all had to prove themselves under real conditions, without reliable WiFi, with a changing audience, running for hours. The result: everything worked exactly as Robin Ströhle had envisioned it.
An infrastructure no one can afford alone only becomes valuable once everyone can use it, even from a distance.
OR-X grew out of financial pressure, but it has become more than that: a national platform that no single hospital could ever have built alone. The virtual tour extends that same logic: visibility and access, regardless of how far an interested party can or wants to travel.
What is a virtual tour of a surgical research centre?
An interactive 360° experience that makes spaces digitally accessible when they cannot be freely visited for safety or capacity reasons. The OR-X Virtual Tour Zurich shows the surgical research and training centre at Balgrist University Hospital across two floors, for web, mobile and Meta Quest 3 VR.
Why was the OR-X built?
Surgical research and training need a realistic operating theatre environment, without putting patient safety at risk. Because many hospitals are under cost pressure and can rarely reserve their own capacity for non-clinical use, Balgrist University Hospital created OR-X as a shared, nationally used infrastructure.
Who can use the OR-X Virtual Tour?
Surgeons, hospitals looking to rent capacity, research partners and medical technology companies wanting to present new equipment, nationally and internationally, freely accessible at vt.avocado360.com/OR-X.
How much does a virtual tour production cost for clinics?
Cost depends on size, number of panoramas and level of interactivity. Avocado360 provides a detailed, no-obligation quote on request. Get in touch →
Planning something similar?
We will show you what a virtual tour could look like for your institution.
