Viasit firmly believes that the operating manual is one of an office chair’s most important quality features. As a manufacturer, Viasit is obliged to include a paper operating manual with every chair delivery. But in this age of digitisation, the company in Neunkirchen believes that modern media must be used to achieve the necessary acceptance of as many users as possible.

The “Impulse” as the start of it all

The Saarland manufacturer’s best-selling “Impulse” chair collection was the first to be given a new operating manual with cutting-edge HTML5 technology, which runs in all standard browsers: Impulse.
 
The dual split screen provides two ways to access the controls: all of the series’ control levers and switches are listed on the left. Clicking on one of the detailed images opens the 3D model of the chair in the main screen, which the user can then turn and tilt in any direction. The operating lever selected by the user is marked in red. When it is clicked, the corresponding function is shown on the 3D model as an animation.
 
To allow the user to reach their destination in various ways intuitively, the principle also works in the reverse sequence: if the user clicks on the 3D model on the main screen, the corresponding detailed image on the lift is highlighted and the function is animated on the 3D model.

WebGL as technical basis

The interactive 3D depiction is based on WebGL, an image library that is a fixed component of all modern web browsers. This allows the chair to be displayed with hardware acceleration in all standard browsers, with no plug-ins needing to be installed, on all platforms and all devices. 
 
And thanks to the informative animation, anyone can set the Impulse chair perfectly regardless of their native language.

The strategy and the technical implementation was the responsibility of Viasit’s long-term business partner Pixellab in Kaiserslautern (www.pixellab.de).