WIPO World Virtual Exhibition — Platform Update & New BRIP Booth

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the United Nations agency dedicated to supporting innovators and creators worldwide. Based in Geneva, it operates across 193 member states and works to ensure that intellectual property rights reward the people behind new ideas and original work. As part of its outreach mission, WIPO maintains the WIPO World of Innovation and Creativity — a fully online, immersive virtual exhibition accessible 24/7 on any device, from desktop to VR headset.

GlobalVision Communication has been involved in this platform since its original build. Recently, WIPO commissioned us to carry out a substantial update — adding a brand-new booth, refreshing content across existing stands, and extending the multilingual experience. Here is what we delivered.

A new booth: Building Respect for IP (BRIP)

The most visible addition to this update is a fully new exhibition booth dedicated to Building Respect for IP (BRIP) — a global WIPO programme that works to counter counterfeiting, piracy and other forms of IP infringement. This is not a fringe issue: according to WIPO, the economic cost of IP theft runs into hundreds of billions of dollars annually, affecting industries from pharmaceuticals to fashion and software.

The BRIP booth lets visitors explore how WIPO coordinates with governments, customs authorities, and rights holders to build awareness and enforcement capacity. Rather than presenting this as a list of policies, the booth uses the same interactive stand format as the rest of the exhibition. Visitors can navigate, click, and discover at their own pace. The goal was to make a topic that can feel abstract — enforcement mechanisms, international treaties, trade standards — feel relevant and tangible.

Content updates across existing booths

Beyond the new booth, we also worked through the existing exhibition stands to update and expand their content. Several booths covering Innovation, Creativity, Inclusion, and Sustainable Development received fresh materials, revised text, and updated interactive elements. These changes were applied across all six language versions simultaneously — English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.

Keeping a platform of this scale consistent across six languages, while maintaining the interactive logic of each booth, requires careful coordination. Every interactive hotspot, every translated caption, every embedded video or image reference needs to behave correctly in each version. This kind of maintenance work is less visible than a new launch, but it directly determines whether a platform stays reliable and useful over time.

A multilingual platform built for a global audience

The six-language format of the WIPO World exhibition is not incidental — it reflects the genuinely international audience WIPO serves. A delegate from Beijing, a student in Buenos Aires, a policymaker in Cairo: each can enter the same virtual space and navigate it in their own language. The content adapts; the experience stays consistent.

This kind of multilingual immersive platform is something GlobalVision has built expertise in through projects with international organizations in Geneva and beyond. The technical challenge is real: managing translations, layout integrity, and interactive behavior across languages in a 360° environment requires both production discipline and careful QA at every step.

The robot guide and the 3D experience

One feature that sets the WIPO World exhibition apart from a standard website is its animated robot guide. This character greets visitors at each booth and provides a brief introduction to the theme — giving the experience a sense of guided flow without making it linear. Visitors still move freely between stands, but they always have a friendly entry point to each topic.

The exhibition also makes use of 3D modeling and animation to bring certain concepts to life in ways that static images cannot. For a subject like intellectual property — which is fundamentally about ideas rather than objects — visual metaphors and interactive 3D elements do a lot of the explanatory work. They give the abstract a form.

Why virtual exhibitions work for international organizations

Physical exhibitions have an obvious limitation: they exist in one place, at one time, for whoever can travel there. A virtual exhibition removes that constraint entirely. The WIPO World platform has been online continuously, accessible to anyone with a browser, in six languages, since its launch. That kind of reach is simply not achievable with a physical setup, regardless of budget.

For organizations like WIPO, whose mandate is genuinely global, this matters. The update we delivered extends the platform’s lifespan, keeps the content accurate and current, and adds a new dimension with the BRIP booth. Together, these changes help WIPO reach a wider audience more effectively — without needing to rebuild from scratch.

Visit the exhibition: WIPO World of Innovation and Creativity

Interested in building or updating a virtual exhibition for your organization? Get in touch with GlobalVision — we have been doing this for international institutions, companies and public bodies across Switzerland and Europe.