ABOUT

About Ocean 3D

Ocean 3D™ creates accessibility-focused 360 virtual tours that help people understand real spaces before they arrive. We started in 2018 with a simple belief: being able to look around a place in advance — “know before you go”, “look before you book” — should sit alongside ramps, hearing loops and Braille signage as part of how organisations think about access.

That idea still drives our work. A virtual tour will not replace physical access or good staff support. For many disabled people, neurodivergent people, people living with anxiety, and anyone facing an unfamiliar building, vehicle or campus, being able to explore first can remove a real barrier.

How we began

Our first major hospitality commissions included Cadbury House by DoubleTree in Bristol. Healthcare followed quickly, including operating theatres at Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust at Treliske and West Cornwall. Those early projects confirmed what we had suspected: people do not only use tours to “look around”. They use them to find their way, reduce uncertainty and decide whether they can attend at all.

In 2019 we won New Civil Engineer’s Future of Airports Innovation Gateway award for the idea that digital twins of transport spaces could support journey planning and accessibility. That immediately drew interest from major International airports and airlines. Covid arrived soon afterwards and those conversations stalled. What Covid did do was push us into education. Colleges and schools needed socially distanced previews, and they also needed a calmer way for disabled students, autistic students and students with anxiety to see a campus before they arrived. Pre-familiarisation stopped being a theory and became day-to-day work.

In 2021 we asked Doughty Street Chambers for counsel’s opinion on whether virtual tours should be treated as an auxiliary aid under the Equality Act 2010. Their view was that, in the right circumstances, the provision of VR or virtual tours is highly likely to be a reasonable step for service providers and, where they have knowledge of the disability, employers. Doughty Street then commissioned a tour of their own premises. The opinion is not a court ruling and it does not make a tour compulsory. It does support the case we had been making since 2018: pre-visit familiarisation can be part of anticipatory accessibility, not a marketing extra.

Around the same period we were invited to take part in a Department for International Trade export mission, and we were later a Tech4Good Accessible Education finalist. We have also spoken with ministers about the practical value of virtual familiarisation, including Mims Davies MP when she was at DWP and Sir Stephen Timms MP. As is often the way with government, interest is real but progress is slow.

What we do

We design and build browser-based 360 virtual tours for accessibility and pre-visit familiarisation. The same tours are also used for marketing, HR onboarding, staff induction, training, facilities management and emergency planning.

A tour can show entrances, routes, reception areas, toilets, lifts, stairs, seating, waiting areas, quiet spaces, assistance points and other details that help people explore and plan with confidence. Before a client commits, we can demonstrate a live tour with a keyboard and screen reader so the accessibility experience can be judged in practice, not only described.

Ocean 3D uses Matterport™ capture technology with an accessibility layer from AVA Access™. From 2025, the virtual tours we create for clients are designed and tested against WCAG 2.2 Level AA within the stated scope, including keyboard access, text alternatives and screen-reader use where configured and tested. We can add British Sign Language, captions and sensory controls where the brief requires them. Tours work on smartphones, tablets and desktops. No separate app or equipment is required. Our earlier standalone augmented reality app was previously certified for use with NHS Digital by ORCHA; our focus now is accessible browser-based tours.

Who we work with

Our work now spans transport, education, healthcare, heritage, tourism, hospitality, leisure, property, public services and the charity sector. Past and present clients and projects include FirstGroup and Lumo trains, Weston College (SEND National beacon college), NHS hospital trusts, the National Trust, the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Wheal Martyn, Charlton Park Academy in London, Theatre Royal Bath, Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport in Texas, the Municipality of Moliterno in Italy, the RNLI, No Stress Yachting, Prestige Villas Corfu, and Cadbury House by DoubleTree.

Lumo has since included its virtual train tour within its Accessible Travel Policy. That matters to us because it treats pre-travel familiarisation as part of service design, not as a novelty.

We are currently in active discussions with other large organisations in transport, heritage and healthcare. Those conversations stay commercially sensitive until the client is ready to say so.

Why pre-familiarisation and virtual tours are important

For many people, not knowing what a place will look like, how to move through it, or where the important bits are is enough to stop the visit, the journey, the appointment or the first day. A well-made virtual tour cannot remove every barrier. It can give people practical information in advance, and it can help organisations offer clearer access information. Good, well-presented, accessible information helps build confidence. Confidence, for almost everyone, can be a powerful purchase-decision making tool.

Whether a tour is a reasonable adjustment depends on the site, the users, the budget and the specific disadvantage being addressed. We can help an organisation work that out before anyone spends money on a scan.

Since 2018, client tours have received more than 5 million views across public and non-public tours. Alongside accessibility, clients use them to attract visitors, brief staff, explain a building and plan for emergencies.

Mind™ reports that 1 in 4 people in England will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year, and that 1 in 5 report a common mental health problem, such as anxiety or depression, in any given week. Purple estimates the combined spending power of disabled people and their households — the “Purple Pound” — at £446 billion a year. Those figures do not mean a virtual tour is the answer on its own. They do explain why clearer pre-visit information is both an access measure and a commercial one.

What has not changed

We still think virtual familiarisation belongs in the same conversation as ramps, loops and clear signage. We also think organisations should be able to inspect the tour, understand the limits of the legal argument, and decide whether it is proportionate for them. That is the work we have been doing since 2018.