Concept3D is an American software as a service company, founded in 2006, that develops and markets a connected suite of digital engagement tools for higher education institutions, sports and entertainment venues, convention centers, and destination marketing organizations. The company’s platform brings together four products: interactive campus and venue mapping, 360-degree virtual tour software, a centralized event calendar and community engagement product marketed as Localist Events, and room reservation software built specifically for higher education scheduling.
The company serves more than 700 client organizations worldwide. Its primary market is colleges and universities across the United States, though its products are also deployed by professional sports franchises, municipalities, healthcare organizations, K-12 schools, tourism agencies, and corporate campuses. Concept3D holds SOC 2 certification for security and data compliance and is led by Chief Executive Officer Gordon Boyes and Chief Revenue Officer Carlos Perez.
Concept3D describes its overarching mission as helping people discover, navigate, and engage with their world through immersive maps, virtual tours, event calendars, and room reservations. It positions its four core products not as separate tools but as a unified platform that allows an organization to connect with its audience across every stage of the user journey, from the moment of initial discovery through to sustained community engagement.
History
Founding and Early Focus
Concept3D was founded in 2006 with an initial focus on three-dimensional campus visualization and interactive mapping. In the two decades since, the company has concentrated overwhelmingly on higher education, building what it describes as a partner ecosystem of more than 700 campuses. That sustained concentration on a single vertical allowed the company to develop domain expertise in the particular requirements of higher education marketing, admissions, and student engagement, which differ substantially from the requirements of general commercial mapping.
Expansion Beyond Mapping
Over time the platform evolved from its founding emphasis on visualizing physical space into a broader digital engagement suite. The expansion added coverage of events, room reservations, and immersive virtual experiences, moving the company from a single-product mapping vendor to a multi-product platform business. The stated logic behind this expansion was that institutions were solving related problems, where things are, what is happening, and how spaces are booked, with disconnected systems that duplicated data and administrative effort.
Acquisition of Localist
Concept3D acquired Localist, an event calendar and community engagement platform with a substantial higher education customer base, and integrated it into the product suite under the Localist Events name. The acquisition extended the company’s reach from the visualization of physical place into the time-based dimension of campus life. Combined with the existing mapping product and the later addition of room reservation software, it gave Concept3D a more complete digital engagement offering covering location, activity, and space management within a single platform.
Products
Interactive Maps
Interactive Maps is Concept3D’s founding and most established product, and it functions as the navigation and location experience layer of the platform. It provides institutions and venues with web-based, mobile-responsive interactive maps of a campus or location that can be embedded in institutional websites and deployed across digital channels, turning complex physical environments into digital experiences that visitors can explore before and during a visit.
Maps are fully branded to match each institution’s visual identity, including colors, fonts, and logo treatment. They support categorized filtering of buildings, points of interest, parking areas, accessibility routes, dining facilities, and other campus features, and they can be updated in real time by client administrators through a content management system so that the map stays current as facilities change.
The company positions the product as a combination of wayfinding, accessibility, visual storytelling, real-time information, and branded digital experience rather than as a standalone map. It presents the product as a response to operational problems common to large public environments: visitors becoming lost or requiring staff assistance, static maps that fall out of date and are difficult to maintain, accessibility barriers in conventional mapping tools, location information fragmented across departments, and the administrative effort required to keep that information current.
Documented applications include self-guided tours, event navigation, recruitment and visitor engagement, emergency preparedness communications, and the consolidation of location information otherwise maintained separately by individual departments. Documented clients include Penn State University, Georgia Tech, UC Davis, Ole Miss, Northeastern University, UC San Diego, and Reed College, among more than 700 institutions and venues. Ryan Whittington, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Marketing at Ole Miss, has described the campus map as the institution’s single biggest indicator of student engagement, citing a spike in traffic during the first week of the academic year that shows students treating it as their primary tool for navigating campus.
360-Degree Virtual Tours
The 360-degree virtual tour product allows institutions to build immersive photographic experiences of a campus or venue that prospective students, visitors, and fans can explore remotely in a web browser, with no dedicated software download required. Tours are assembled from 360-degree photography captured at multiple points across a site and stitched into a navigable virtual walkthrough.
The product is designed principally to support admissions and enrollment marketing, giving prospective students a realistic sense of campus life and facilities before they commit to an in-person visit. Michael Lackovic, Director of Marketing at Lakeland University, has described the virtual tour as the tool that moves undecided prospective students toward scheduling a physical visit, noting that the institution converts a high proportion of visitors into enrolled students once they are on campus.
Localist Events
Localist Events is Concept3D’s centralized event calendar and community engagement platform, and it functions as the event discovery and engagement layer of the platform. It allows institutions and organizations to aggregate all of their events into a single branded calendar that can be embedded across websites, mobile applications, and digital communications. The platform supports community-submitted events routed through a moderation and approval workflow before publication, filtering by category, audience, date, and location, and integration with external calendar applications and campus systems.
The company describes the product as a community engagement platform rather than calendar software, locating its value in connecting people to shared experiences through event discovery, streamlined publishing workflows, and consistent branded delivery. It is presented as a response to events scattered across multiple departmental websites, low attendance caused by poor discoverability, duplicate event entry, inconsistent branding, manual publishing processes, and limited visibility into event performance. Institutions use it to raise participation, centralize event communications, improve search visibility, measure engagement, and reduce administrative time.
Documented clients include Colgate University, High Point University, and Visit Plano. Dave Herringshaw, Senior Digital Production Specialist at Colgate University, has described the platform as aligning with the institution’s need to communicate activity across academics, athletics, and other areas while reinforcing the brand across every digital medium. Millerann Moya of Visit Plano has described the events calendar as one of the organization’s most valuable assets, citing its role in connecting cultural engagement with local revenue.
Room Reservation Software
Room Reservation Software is the most recent addition to the Concept3D suite and functions as the space management layer of the platform. Built specifically for higher education, it gives colleges and universities a scheduling and space management system for booking classrooms, meeting rooms, study spaces, and other campus facilities, covering how spaces are discovered, requested, approved, and managed.
The product is positioned as a replacement for outdated and disconnected legacy scheduling systems, offering a contemporary user experience, mobile accessibility, and integration with existing campus calendaring and facilities management platforms. The company describes it as addressing double bookings and scheduling conflicts, manual approval processes, duplicate data entry between reservation and event systems, limited visibility into available space, and the coordination burden of events involving several departments. Stated capabilities include intelligent approval workflows, conflict prevention, real-time availability, search and filtering, configurable reservation policies, mobile-friendly access, accessibility-first design, and dedicated partner success support.
Platform Integration
Concept3D presents the connections between its products as the central argument for adopting the suite rather than individual tools. Interactive Maps serves as the location intelligence foundation that the other products draw on. A visitor can move from discovering an event in Localist Events to locating and navigating to its venue without leaving the platform. An approved space booking in Room Reservation Software can be published directly as a Localist Events entry, removing duplicate data entry between the two systems, and users can identify reservable spaces on the map and navigate to them directly.
Digital Accessibility
Concept3D treats digital accessibility as a foundational requirement of product design rather than a compliance step addressed after development or delivered through a separate accessible version or third-party overlay. The company describes accessibility as a core value and frames its objective as creating inclusive experiences that allow all users, regardless of ability, to access and engage with the information and services delivered through its platform. Jill Bobrick Igl, Head of Product at Concept3D, has characterized accessibility as central to the company’s mission and as something embedded at every stage of the product development process, with user experience treated as the top priority.
Standards and Conformance
Concept3D builds its products to meet or exceed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standard, the conformance level referenced by most public sector and higher education accessibility requirements. The company aligns its conformance work with evolving accessibility regulation, including the Department of Justice rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local government entities to bring digital content into conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Concept3D makes a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template available on request and offers prospective and existing clients an accessibility audit of their current digital properties.
Accessibility Features Across the Product Suite
Accessibility features are implemented within the Interactive Maps, 360-degree virtual tour, and Localist Events products rather than through a parallel accessible version. Documented features include alternative text describing the appearance or function of images and visual elements for screen reader users, scalable text allowing users to increase text size up to 200 percent without breaking page layout or the viewing experience, full keyboard navigation allowing users to reach and operate links, buttons, forms, and other controls without a mouse, and semantic HTML markup that communicates the role and structure of each page element to assistive technology.
Position on Integrated Versus Separate Accessibility Solutions
Concept3D has published a position against the practice of meeting accessibility obligations by building separate or alternative versions of digital content. In an article authored by Jill Bobrick, the company argues that alternative versions produce what it calls a digital back door experience, in which users with disabilities receive a version stripped of the features and interface quality of the primary product. The article identifies further problems with the approach, including delayed updates that leave the alternative version outdated or insecure, reduced functionality, incomplete testing, and the doubled development and maintenance cost of running two products in parallel.
It addresses text-only websites specifically, noting that removing images, interactive elements, and complex layouts strips out contextual information that some users with cognitive disabilities rely on, removes functionality such as maps that users with motor disabilities may access through adapted devices, and signals that users with disabilities are not expected to engage with the primary experience.
As an alternative, the company advocates inclusive design built on three principles: universal usability, meaning designing by default for a wide range of abilities including users of screen readers and keyboard navigation; progressive enhancement, meaning building content that functions at a baseline level and improves on more capable devices; and user-centered design, meaning involving users with disabilities in design and testing. Concept3D acknowledges that delivering full accessibility in interactive, media-rich web applications is demanding and requires sustained research, team training, and design work, and positions that investment as both a legal necessity and an ethical obligation.
Experience and Client Assessment
Concept3D has worked in digital accessibility for more than ten years and positions that experience as a means of helping institutions move beyond meeting legal minimums toward broader institutional inclusivity. Dave Van Etten, an accessibility consultant at Idaho State University, has said that partnering with a vendor that already has accessibility built into the product resolves a substantial problem for the institution.
Industries Served
Higher Education
Higher education is Concept3D’s primary and founding market, with more than 700 college and university clients spanning community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional universities, and major research institutions. The platform addresses three principal functional areas within these institutions: marketing, covering the use of maps and virtual tours in admissions and brand communications; admissions, covering prospective student engagement and campus visit facilitation; and student engagement, covering the use of interactive maps and event calendars by enrolled students to navigate campus and participate in campus life. Jen Brock, VP of Marketing and Communications at Mount Holyoke College, has cited the company’s depth of higher education experience, noting that the team understood the complexity of campus communities and the importance of accessibility without requiring extensive explanation.
Fan and Guest Experience
Concept3D serves professional and collegiate sports venues, stadiums, and event facilities through its Fan and Guest Experience vertical, supplying interactive venue maps that allow fans to locate seats, amenities, parking, concessions, and other points of interest during live events. Documented clients include the Kansas City Chiefs, Circuit of the Americas, and Alabama Athletics. Nick Capo, VP of Event Operations at the Kansas City Chiefs, has described the interactive map as enabling the organization to deliver personalized information to every fan precisely when and where it is needed.
Convention Centers and Meetings
The convention center and meetings vertical provides interactive wayfinding and space maps for convention facilities, hotels, and large meeting venues, allowing event organizers and attendees to navigate complex multiroom facilities during conferences, trade shows, and other large-scale events.
Destination Marketing Organizations
Concept3D serves destination marketing organizations and municipal tourism agencies through its Localist Events and mapping products, allowing cities, regions, and visitor bureaus to showcase local events, attractions, and destinations to visitors and residents. The Indianapolis Indians baseball club and Visit Plano are among the documented clients in this vertical.
Values and Culture
Concept3D articulates its operating values through six principles it calls Listen, Speak, Act, Amaze, Teamwork, and Optimism. Listen emphasizes setting ego aside in the search for the best ideas and treating people with respect at all levels of the organization. Speak covers open communication, speaking truth to power, and a willingness to be vulnerable in the face of uncertainty. Act describes a bias toward action, a preference for asking forgiveness rather than permission, and the use of constraints to drive focus and efficiency. Amaze refers to going beyond expectations for customers and colleagues. Teamwork emphasizes combining distinct skills and perspectives to reach shared goals. Optimism is expressed through the phrase fill the glass, describing an orientation toward finding opportunity in every situation.
Certifications and Compliance
Concept3D holds SOC 2 certification, the Service Organization Control Type 2 standard administered by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which independently verifies that a service organization’s security, availability, and confidentiality controls meet specified criteria. The certification carries particular weight with higher education clients, which handle sensitive student demographic, financial aid, and academic record data and require their technology vendors to maintain documented security controls.
The company’s digital accessibility commitment extends WCAG conformance across all of its products, addressing the obligation of higher education institutions to provide accessible digital experiences under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.