Archinect - News

German universities develop "virtual meeting room" where users can meet with colleagues as avatars

2020-07-27T15:58:00-04:00

Developed by visualization experts from six universities in Baden-Württemberg with members of the Visualization Department of the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), a new project entitled "Virtual Collaboration Laboratories Baden-Württemberg" (KoLab) allows users in different locations to meet and collaborate in a virtual settings.

AR and VR collaborative environments aren't new in the design and construction industry, but often, users need to be in the same location to participate, usually viewing a localized model in a central location. According to Tech Xplore, "meeting participants are represented by avatars that can communicate in virtual reality, where they can collaboratively observe, analyze, and interact with 3-D visualizations — all from their workplaces or even home offices."

Panasonic unveils the world's first HDR1 ultra-HD VR eyeglasses

2020-01-07T16:29:00-05:00

Panasonic announced in January 2020 that it has developed the world's first High Dynamic Range (HDR) capable ultra-high definition (UHD) VR eyeglasses that sport a comfortable fit, giving users the "feeling of wearing eyeglasses."

In a field where VR is becoming a useful tool in client interaction and internal design process, user-friendliness and comfort are qualities of value. Panasonic develops the VR eyeglasses in response to the anticipated commercial services that will be offered with the 5G mobile communications system.

Things like sports viewing and interactive virtual traveling experience are a few of the expected uses of next generation VR and one would wonder how architects will begin to capitalize on the new capabilities of the tool.

The glasses also incorporate high-quality audio for a fully immersive user experience.

A new VR event and meeting space takes shape in Milwaukee

2019-11-18T12:20:00-05:00

Bay View will soon become home to a new meeting and event space that focuses on virtual reality, for both work and play...Owners and brothers Ryan and Reid Spiering purchased the building two years ago with plans for a VR-related concept. Their initial interest was driven by a shared love for video games, but as architecture, engineering and construction professionals, they also saw opportunity for VR within the local market.

The two brothers built-out the 1,000-square-foot space that will house three separate VR areas. Each will have a "high-tech" headset, an overhead computer, and an HD screen, reports BizTimes.

Rendering of meeting configuration.

Ryan Spiering is a visualization and virtual reality specialist at HGA and his brother Reid is a structural engineer at CORE 4 Engineering. The two envision the venue space, called RSVR, will be used for a multitude of purposes. It is due to open on January 2nd.

Rendering of arcade configuration.

Faculty members from Cornell's architecture department develop virtual reality program for popular video game company Epic Games

2019-06-27T13:56:00-04:00

Faculty in the Department of Architecture have received a cash gift from Epic Games Inc. in support of their work on Virtual Places, a project that is adapting the company's virtual reality (VR) gaming engine, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), for architectural and urban design.

Three Cornell professors used virtual reality to create and expand on their research project Virtual Places. The study of architecture and video games is a growing focus. Within academia and practice, VR is a tool which helps unpack architectural ideas for learning as well as creating visualization possibilities for clients. Epic Games Inc., a video game and software development company known for creating the popular online game Fortnite, selected Professor Henry Richardson, Assistant Professor Timur Dogan, and Assistant Professor of the Practice Martin Miller as winners of a cash prize out of a pool of invited finalists for the international competition.

Image of Rockerfeller Center - taken from Virtual Places: Real Time Experiential Design and Visualization of Urban Spaces. Image courtesy of Cornell AAP

According to Richardson, "Virtual Places was launched this spring with a research seminar called Gaming Architecture. Both upper-class undergraduates and graduate students 'stress t...

An immersive 35,000 square foot art park opens in Los Angeles' Arts District

2019-01-14T15:32:00-05:00

The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles is filled with several must-see locations. Now home to one of the world's first fully immersive entertainment art park, Wisdome LA allows for visitors to enter into unforgettable audio and visual experience. The park features five fully immersive domes that are outfitted for 360-degree visual and audio entertainment. Each dome is fitted with 10.1 surround sound to enhance the shared VR experience that showcases the future of art, entertainment, and technology.

Image © Wisdome LA

Image @ Wisdome LA

Image © Tanya Nesta

Image © WisdomeLA

The park can hold up to 1,000 people inside and around the domes. Through the use of 360-degree projection mapping technology, the domes display beautifully mesmerizing images. The centerpiece of the exhibition will feature renowned digital artist Android Jones and his project, Samskara. "This city is one of the creative capitals of the worlds and is filled with people looking to learn, try something different, a...

Studying a Brazilian favela via VR

2018-01-18T16:00:00-05:00

[...] Penn State landscape architecture professor Timothy Baird and architecture professor José Duarte taught a new studio that engaged students in the study of one Brazilian favela via virtual reality (VR) technology. The studio, which paired architecture students with landscape architecture students, posited VR as a proxy for expensive site visits. “Developing countries can’t always afford consultants because of the distance and difficulty to travel,” says Baird [...]

"Duarte, who has studied informal settlements across the globe, believes in their power to model emergent patterns of more sustainable resource consumption in the developing world, and in the ability for contemporary technology to decode how they work," the Landscape Architecture Magazine writes and quotes Duarte saying: "They are not a problem. They are a solution with many problems."

The Moscow That Never Was: new VR/AR tour showcases unrealized icons of Soviet architecture

2018-01-04T15:24:00-05:00

New virtual reality tours are giving Muscovites the chance to see the Russian capital as the socialist utopia envisioned by the city’s Soviet architects. The new project, The Moscow That Never Was, lets visitors glimpse shelved Soviet landmarks as they should have appeared on Moscow’s streets using VR goggles.

The 2-hour virtual/augmented reality tours through central Moscow feature utopian architectural projects that never quite saw the light of day, including the infamous Palace of the Soviets (imagined as the world's tallest building, crowned with a 300-ft Lenin statue), an alternate Lenin Mausoleum, Stalin's eighth 'sisters' skyscraper in Zarayadye Park, the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry HQ on Red Square, among others.

More information about the The Moscow That Never Was tours here.

All images via Retro Futuro.

Tinkering connections between architecture and neuroscience

2017-06-06T15:54:00-04:00

The importance of urban design goes far beyond feel-good aesthetics. A number of studies have shown that growing up in a city doubles the chances of someone developing schizophrenia, and increases the risk for other mental disorders such as depression and chronic anxiety.

While it might appear as common intuitive knowledge, humans are strongly influenced by their context. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in studies on the connection between neuroscience and architecture.

Last month, London's Conscious Cities Conference brought together architects, designers, engineers, neuroscientists and psychologists to encourage more multidisciplinary engagement. Some of the recent psychological studies focus on defining a stimulating space through the use of wearable devices that monitor skin conductance, various apps, VR and EEG headsets for either visualizing or measuring brain's activity and mental states. Other findings include data on the impact of building facades on our moods, green space on our health, and urban environments on our social interactions.

Analyzing the ways in which the built environment affects our brains through evidence-based research can grant architects the insight needed for making healthier and more socially-consc...

Virtual Reality: An Architect’s #1 Marketing and Business Development Tool

2016-08-25T15:05:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by Yulio.

There’s no denying it: Virtual Reality (VR) creates a buzz. It’s exciting and attention-grabbing. It attracts and then holds. And keeps holding. Wherever you go, a pair of goggles instantly draws a crowd.

For businesses in the Architecture and Interior Design industries, VR technology becomes a fantastic marketing and business development opportunity. Telling – or showing – prospects that you’re using VR is great for sparking conversations and leaving lasting first impressions.

For those interested in or actively experimenting with it VR, here’s a few tips for using this technology as a business development and marketing tool in your business.

1. Give a great first impression

Show, don’t tell. The best way to explain what VR can do is to simply hand your client or prospect a pair of goggles. Pre-load it with a sample space, past projects or perhaps even a 360° ‘before’ photo, and let them imagine the possibilities for themselves.

Make sure you know y...

Pokémon Go is forcing us to grapple with 'virtual usage' zoning

2016-08-11T13:22:00-04:00

“if augmented reality really catches on, and an internet environment overlaid on our real world surroundings becomes common, what will be the rules around using that augmented space?" [...] Could you sell, lease, or subdivide the digital rights to your own home, yard, or lobby? Could you extract a toll, tax, or commission from virtual usage?

Referencing multiple, international cases of private property disputes over the mega-popular Pokémon Go game, Geoff Manaugh floats the idea of zoning regulations for virtual and augmented reality instances.

As players wander through public and private spaces alike to catch 'em all, they inevitably trespass on certain stakeholders ideas' of what's allowed in that space—especially if the 'Trainers' are profiting financially in any way from occupying, say, a suburban front yard.

As these disputes proliferate (whether from Pokémon Go, or the next AR/VR game to takes its place in popularity), Manaugh's piece poses the following: What rights do virtual entities have to be in those spaces? What rights to property owners have to keep Snorlax from napping in their hammock?

More AR/VR on Archinect:

Yulio offers architects a DIY Virtual Reality platform

2016-07-07T09:00:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by Yulio.

AN INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUAL REALITY

Though Virtual Reality (VR) is yet to truly break into the mainstream consumer market, it’s an industry growing at breakneck speed.

With Deloitte Global predicting a $1bn year for the VR industry this year, and Digi Capital estimating it to hit $30bn by 2020, it won’t be long before VR is in the hands of millions of consumers worldwide.

Yet though initial traction for the industry has been centered around the gaming and entertainment communities, VR is making serious headway as a tool for health, education, and business.

VIRTUAL REALITY FOR ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIOR DESIGN

For an architect or designer, viewing an image of a 3D space is enough to fully visualize the space around them. Yet this is not the case for the clients, who typically lack this ability. Yulio aims to bridge this communication gap through VR technology.

“Virtual Reality technology transforms crucial aspects of the client-engagement experience b...

How VR Reframes Big Questions in Philosophy

2016-05-24T12:09:00-04:00

Some people think VR is a second class reality. I am not sure of that

There are some convincing points here by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. Just imagine how the humanities future is being shaped by the fast developing technologies.

NBBJ's VR venture: Managing Partner Steve McConnell and John SanGiovanni, co-founder of VR firm Visual Vocal, on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #23

2016-05-16T15:01:00-04:00

Today's podcast guests are NBBJ Managing Partner Steve McConnell and John SanGiovanni, co-founder of Visual Vocal, a new company bringing virtual and augmented reality systems to the architecture industry. As an investor in Visual Vocal, NBBJ plans to foster the company in all of its design processes, using its collaborative platforms to communicate among designers, clients, and users, at all stages of project development. With a beta program launching this summer, Steve and John gave me a taste of how NBBJ plans to use the service, why it invested in the company in the first place, and how ubiquitous VR stands to dramatically change the architectural process.

Listen to One-to-One #23 with Steve McConnell and John SanGiovanni:

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NBBJ is launching its own VR platform with the help of ex-Microsoft entrepreneurs

2016-04-28T18:22:00-04:00

NBBJ and Visual Vocal will leverage current-generation VR and augmented reality (AR) systems, with a near-term focus on mobile VR platforms for optimal accessibility and scale. While a number of firms in the design industry have examined the promise of VR, this partnership marks the first instance of an established design firm incubating a VR startup inside its own offices and developing new tools to improve decision-making and remove waste from the design process.

Virtually Inevitable – VR and AR, IRL on Archinect Sessions #51

2016-02-04T18:43:00-05:00

Virtual Reality is very much here, in all its messy, beautiful, uncanny glory. The gee-whiz factor notwithstanding, the technology holds a bevy of architectural applications and implications, and manages to hold a mirror up to the built environment to show us things that we couldn't understand before.

This episode, we discuss a host of recent VR stories, from the narrative VR journalism of Emblematic Group to Thorsten Wiedemann's VR performance art, an AR helmet that streamlines the construction site and VR-value-added rendering services for firms.

Joining us on this VR-trip is Rebecca Howard, freshly returned from New York where she developed video content for the Times, and helped them launch their entry into VR content.

Listen to episode 51 of Archinect Sessions, "Virtually Inevitable":

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Man spends 48 hours in VR without interruption – and survives

2016-01-27T17:17:00-05:00

After staging [a 48-hr long continuous VR experience], [Thorsten] Wiedemann is convinced that “long period VR trips” are possible, and that current technology is sufficient for such purposes. The only problem was when he had a panic attack after the 25th hour, when he was pretty close to giving up. “I had no physical problems, no burning eyes, killing headaches or nausea,” Wiedemann says. “The path to the future is now prepared..."

Related:

"A blueprint can give you an idea, but this cements it for you.” – VR's promising future in architectural communications

2016-01-25T18:00:00-05:00

LHB has become one of the nation’s first design firms to incorporate virtual reality, or VR, across the sweep of its in-house teams [...] “With VR, you can inhabit the space in full scale...You get a far more physical sense of what that space is going to be.” [...] Virtual reality also has potential to be “the great equalizer,” LHB’s Fischer noted. A middle-school maintenance worker can put on a VR headset and notice design flaws that might go unnoticed by project managers.

Are virtual reality systems sexist?

2015-12-30T14:20:00-05:00

That headline paraphrases the research question of Danah Boyd, who, as a computer science student in 2000, wrote her bachelor thesis on whether VR systems were being designed in such a way to defer to, biologically, the male gaze. The research is in no way definitive, but probes an essential question as VR technologies become more ubiquitous and technologically advanced, and for our understanding of "inclusive" programming in design.

Boyd revisited her research in a 2014 Quartz article, on the occasion of Facebook acquiring Oculus Rift (signaling a huge move for VR research and commercialization). In the article, she outlines how human sight is heavily influenced by a person's sex. More sex hormones hang out on the retina than anywhere else (other than the gonads) on the human body. And so depending on your sex chromosome, you'll get more of a certain set of hormones – and the balance of those hormones affect how we see.

Depth perception in human vision is rendered, biologically, in t...