Enhance your Design work using AR/VR tools

Synopsis:

Start using immersive technologies beyond viewing and use their full creative potential to enhance the creative process itself. Design buildings, cities or interiors together using your hands and connect the outcomes back to BIM using new tools and workflows that can disrupt the way we traditionally design our spaces.

Learning Objectives:

1. What creative AR/VR devices and software are useful for your office

2. How can I use AR/VR as a more interactive part of the design and authoring process

3. How to collaboratively prototype in AR/VR and link this data back to your BIM workflows

Body:

Technologies like BIM can greatly enhance our design work and enabled all stakeholders to share and coordinate their ideas in a more efficient way. But designers need discipline and lots of training before they can fully harness tools like Revit during the idea exploration stage. These early stages of the design are often so uncertain and option driven that architects prefer to explore options using sketches, scale models and manual 3D modelling tools that can be time-consuming to create and difficult to communicate.

Virtual Reality has taken the architecture field by storm. This technology poses a huge potential for a profession where a big portion of our time is spent communicating about spaces, scale, and user experience. Gamified tools already had a big impact on our industry seen with the rise of real-time rendering, multi-user viewers and interactive tools for architectural presentations. Affordable high-end VR hardware has now been around for 5 years and most offices have a VR headset for viewing their designs, but only a few designers use immersive technologies for their full creative potential: a more powerful and easy way to alter digital creations using your hands and communicate spatial ideas clearly to all project stakeholders.

I will demonstrate the available VR modelling tools on-stage to show how easy it is to prototype buildings, urban designs and interiors using this technology. And will explain the pros/cons and differences between VR/AR modelling tools that can be categorised in:
3D painting – mesh editing – sculpting – object placement – NURB editing – volumetric modelling

In total, I will discuss about 16 AR/VR design tools, their pro’s and con’s and how they can be used in a variety of architectural use cases. As most of these tools are not built for our industry I will describe workflows for getting models in and out our building information modelling environment.

I will end by showing how this technology can already be applied to enhance productivity common creative use-cases like sketching on existing context to quickly draft new ideas, rapidly prototyping new shapes and making area calculation studies, investigating different design options with your clients and sharing and remotely working with teams in the same virtual design environment.

The class will give an introduction and overview of the available VR/AR tools, workflows, creative software and cross-platform interoperability between VR and CAD/BIM software. Delegates of all technical levels will be able to take away something from this class and start using this technology to enhance the creativity and productivity in their office.