In the past, to see a pre-constructed state of the house that you would one day live in, you had to be able to read blueprints or hire an artist to sketch it out. Later came the ability to have a 3D rendering of that house on a screen, but you’d still have to work hard to envision it in real life.
Now, thanks to the mixed reality, you’ll be able to see your future home in all its glory, standing right where it’s supposed to go — in its actual soon-to-be size.
We’ve seen something like this before on Next Reality, but it was just a HoloLens concept at that point. VeriCon, a Netherlands-based structural engineering company, has gone all the way and turned it into an actual visualization platform for future homeowners, as you’ll see in their video demo below.
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What does your development environment look like?
At the moment, a WIN10 virtual machine in our network with Unity and Visual Studio. And a Wi-Fi access point to deploy the app and upload files that we need IFC (model data) or BCF (comment/topic data) both for BIM collaboration. We check regularly for newer versions to keep up with the latest and greatest from both Microsoft and Unity.
There are some limitations to a virtual machine to be able to use the current HoloLens emulator in Unity since we cannot get access to some ports. The emulator from Microsoft does work on the virtual machine.
What were the successes you found in the process?
We had our first very simple app with design data up and running the first week. After that, it was finding out how to interact with the model. Our menus evolved from a few buttons in the air to a nice UI. Working with the HoloLens and the 3D models make you aware that scale 1:1 is way too big for an office space, so you need smart commands in buttons or voice. You learn with experiments, and our customer tests give a lot off feedback. Also, looking at videos from other people helps us with ideas to get better or smarter.
Finding out that deploying a release version is way better than a debug version to keep up the frame rate for smooth viewing and faster loading. Letting the user know what he can do or if his hand is in sight is very important. And where is your menu all the time (we now have a focus menu voice command to take care of that). And the menu should not be in the way hiding your model/data.
What hurdles or particularly hard problems held you back?
Not much is documented for HoloLens, and errors/messages from Microsoft are not always clear what is wrong and how to fix it. You don’t have much control on where you can put your data (very restricted file access).
Also, the 2 GB RAM and ‘small’ SSD is limiting with bigger models. So smart loading is needed (which info-layer and which building story).
I personally wear glasses, so the field of view limits that affect many people claim is not so much for me. But would be nice if it was a bit bigger.
The Wi-Fi connection at the office is not very stable to let other people view (that is why we use the Surface tablet). Not sure if this is due to hardware issues of our router or the HoloLens. When out of Wi-Fi range, all Cortana commands do not work, so you have to implement your own take picture and start and stop recording commands to be able to log your experience (sometimes a smartphone was used for an internet connection). And we found that a button combination on the HoloLens would allow you to take a picture.
Did you find any particular external APIs that made the difference for you?
To be able to read and display IFC data, we use “IFC Engine DLL” from RDF (in Bulgaria). The DLL did not work on the HoloLens at first since it depended on some DLLs that were not present on the HoloLens. They helped us to solve that problem (after trying ourselves for a week). Very good service! If we had to program that ourselves, it would have taken years to read IFC files and make correct geometry data.
For the rest, we use the HoloToolkit and built-in assets for Unity.
With little prior knowledge of BIM myself, and now after having done some research, it seems to me to be a useful process and standard, allowing the companies making these large projects to do so with safety in mind, while offering modularity for changes that arise. I can see the ideas presented in VeriCon’s videos adding a useful approach to that process.
Thanks to Sander Ekstijn for taking his time to talk to me and fill us in on his team’s approach. While I do understand structural engineering is their primary focus, I do hope to see their home previs software come out. The woman’s excitement in the video alone should show what a world of discovery is coming soon.
Source: Next Reality