Commonwealth Stadium, Edmonton, in Canada has partnered with OnePlan to create a fully interactive 3D Venue Twin of its stadium. With its rich history hosting multiple sports and entertainment events, it’s now planning for the future with an interactive digital twin opening huge operational and commercial opportunities.
We spoke to Jason Fesyk, Supervisor for Stadium and Major Events Facilities, about how Commonwealth Stadium’s Venue Twin is a game-changer for integrated planning, sales and comms, providing a forward look on how events at the stadium will be in the years ahead.
Venue Twin is ideal - it gives us a forward look into what our venue could look like.”
Jason Fesyk
Supervisor for Stadium & Major Events, Commonwealth Stadium
Venue Twin is a fully interactive, centimeter accurate 3D digital twin of any venue, providing huge operational and commercial benefits. This can all be done with seamless integration between the Venue Twin and other OnePlan functionality including 2D, satellite and CAD.
“Covid has fast-tracked event and venue technology. What our clients were forecasting in a few years’ time, they’re now asking for now. That’s why we’ve created Venue Twin,” says OnePlan CEO Paul Foster.
For Jason Fesyk at Commonwealth Stadium, it brings instant benefits. “This is a game-changer. Coming from an event background, I’ve got powerpoint slides, lots of different dot plans, spreadsheets that don’t integrate. As a collaborative system OnePlan was attractive for us. Venue Twin is ideal – it gives us a forward look into what our venue could look like.”
Adapting the stadium for Sports and Entertainment Events
Commonwealth Stadium, Edmonton hosts a range of sports and entertainment events, that’s included the 2015 women’s football World Cup, to concerts for David Bowie and Beyonce. As such, Jason’s team often needs to quickly adapt the stadium.
“There’s a lot going on in our complex all the time: outside of the stadium itself, there are parking lots, a 5,000 seat soccer stadium nearby, a fully operational recreation centre, and so on. The opportunity to integrate our environment and create a Venue Twin so that we can see operationally what it’s going to look like is a pretty big move for us.”
“Having OnePlan’s Venue Twin allows us that flexibility and gives us the opportunity to ensure the venue is prepared and ready for the next event it hosts,” says Jason.
The 3D Venue Twin is accessed and controlled within OnePlan, meaning seamless integration to instantly switch between 2D and 3D modes. Jason can interact in either mode, and the 3D visualizations allow for incredible fly-throughs of the stadium from any angle. This includes defining television broadcast views.
Infrastructure, signs and branding can all be easily changed by the user, without the need for CAD drawings to be updated.
Having OnePlan’s Venue Twin allows us that flexibility and gives us the opportunity to ensure the venue is prepared and ready for the next event it hosts.”
Jason Fesyk
Supervisor for Stadium & Major Events, Commonwealth Stadium
Venue Twin as a Marketing Tool
Venue Twin can be a powerful sales and marketing tool for venues, with a number of features to empower your teams.
Jason continues: “VenueTwin has so many useful tools. The planning side is one thing, but we can use this as a marketing piece as well.”
The entire venue – the outside district, every floor level inside, and of course the playing area – can all be shown in a Venue Twin. Videos can also be exported to send to prospective customers.
It gives sponsors a much better view of what their brand’s going to look like in our venue"
Jason Fesyk
Supervisor for Stadium & Major Events, Commonwealth Stadium
With Venue Twin, Jason and his team at Commonwealth Stadium have been able to “assess usable space and areas to build out compounds that aren’t currently there. Being able to build out different set-ups for sports and concerts provides us with so many more possibilities for how we envision our stadium in any future state.”
These can be easily shared with event promoters, sponsors and advertisers for a hyper-realistic view of what the venue will look like in any scenario. “It gives sponsors a much better view of what their brand’s going to look like in our venue,” explains Jason.
Venue Twin can empower your sales team
World Cup 2026 Candidate Host City
Commonwealth Stadium, and the City of Edmonton, used Venue Twin in its bid to be a host venue for the FIFA Men’s World Cup 2026, showing how changes to the stadium will appear, including signage and branding.
“We’re very excited to use Venue Twin to show what our stadium will look like in 2026. We’re using OnePlan and Venue Twin to meet FIFA standards. We took our 2D plans, and then show a real-time, realistic virtual walkthrough of the stadium in 3D.”
The partnership between Commonwealth Stadium and the City of Edmonton brings potential to integrate other venues in the city by using OnePlan. Training venues, fan sites and any other venue can be created in a fully interactive 3D digital environment, meaning the city can visualise and plan ahead with ease and accuracy.
The opportunity to integrate our environment and create a Venue Twin so that we can see operationally what it's going to look like is a pretty big move for us.”
Jason Fesyk
Supervisor for Stadium & Major Events, Commonwealth Stadium
Quick to create, providing long-term benefits
Jason has found the process to create the 3D Venue Twin quick and easy. “If you bring the data to them, very quickly they were able to pull our stadium together. It has been an amazing, integrative piece.
“The time frame it’s taken to get to the point we are at now has been very short. I’m very impressed with what the OnePlan team has done.”
To create a 3D digital twin of your venue, contact us today.
