Helping players understand what makes an instrument different
Buying a guitar online involves more than comparing specifications. Players want to examine its shape, explore the details and imagine the instrument in their hands.
Emerald’s guitars give them plenty to investigate. Their construction and design include features that deserve a closer look, while customisation adds another layer of decisions.
Tapmod has worked with Emerald over several years, creating the 3D models used in its guitar configurator and continuing to update them as the instruments develop. That work now supports a new way to explore the range: interactive product tours.
From choosing options to exploring the instrument
Emerald’s 3D Guitar Builder lets players visualise their choices as they configure a guitar.
The interactive tours address another part of the buying process: understanding the instrument itself. Visitors can rotate the guitar, look closer and follow annotations and animations that explain individual features.
For five updated models, these tours give Emerald a way to connect product explanations directly to the details visitors are looking at. A player can follow their curiosity, discover a feature and understand why it might matter to them.
A new experience built on an existing 3D foundation
The interactive tours build on models originally created for Emerald’s Guitar Builder during a collaboration that began in 2020.
The X20 is one example. We updated its soundhole and a few other details to reflect changes to the physical instrument, while retaining the existing model as the foundation for the new tour.
This gave Emerald a way to introduce a new product experience using work already developed for its configurator. The models continued to serve the brand as its instruments and ways of presenting them evolved.
Two applications of the X20 models. Product details and revisions shown in these captures may differ.
Building the experience with Vectary
The tours were created through a collaboration between Emerald Guitars, Tapmod and Vectary.
Tapmod developed the original Guitar Builder and contributed the detailed guitar models, model updates and knowledge developed through years of working with Emerald’s instruments. The Vectary team shaped and built the interactive storytelling on its platform, bringing together the annotations, animations and sequence of exploration.
The result gives visitors a guided introduction while leaving them free to examine the instrument for themselves.