I remember making a 3D model of my parent’s first house back in 2007. All I had were our architect’s drawings, Google SketchUp and a battered old IBM ThinkPad R51 (with a 1.5 GHz Pentium M chip, 512 MB RAM and a 40 GB HDD, no less). At the time, I didn’t really have a reason for doing it. I was bored, had time on my hands and SketchUp was a fascinating new tool.
Following a couple of days of struggle with the stuttering machine — and my ineptitude with SketchUp didn’t help — I finally had a 3D model that bore a passing resemblance to the house we wanted. The finished product wasn’t the masterpiece I hoped it was, but it beat a 2D, architect’s drawing any day of the week. The walls were in the right place, if a little lower than expected, the roof was up and SketchUp gave me the option to model sunlight. Pencil on paper just didn’t compare.
That model was an eye opener. Little details that we hadn’t thought of earlier started popping out. The external structure looked too bland, for example, and so mom decided that a patterned wall would improve it. We fine tuned the design of the pergola to accommodate our car, experimented with various types of sloped roofs and even tried different layouts for the staircase. Many of these changes made their way into the final design.
The 3D model gave us a whole new perspective on our home. We could model sunlight at various times of the day, get an estimate of the usable garden area and even check the layout of the interior with some of the larger furniture. Explaining something to the architect and the workers building the house took on a new level of comfort. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an interactive 3D model worth?
Given that experience, when Autodesk invited me to their office to demo their ‘VR in construction’ offerings, is it any wonder that I jumped at the opportunity?
I was excited to see what VR would bring to the table. As a gamer and technology journalist, I’ve played around with various games and VR headsets, mixed reality headsets and the like. The VR experience is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t used VR before, and I was curious to see how the experience would translate to the design and construction fields.
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Autodesk’s office in Mumbai features a demo room where they’ve hooked up an HTC Vive VR headset to a laptop. The demo was brief, but just as revelatory as I had anticipated. As part of the demo, I could explore an apartment in VR using the Vive.
Where 3D models on a computer screen are still 2D representations of a 3D object, in VR, they come alive. Now the virtual apartment I was exploring wasn’t particularly well rendered, and the “screen-door effect” of using a VR headset was still irritating, but I couldn’t help but get drawn into the space.
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VR and AR are also seeing increasing acceptance in commercial construction projects. With the right tools, engineers and architects alike can visualise spaces better. Franchises like Starbucks sell an experience, how better to refine that experience than in VR?
The DAQRI Smart Helmet Case study, for example, highlights this very well. DAQRI, an American company specialising in AR work, partnered with Autodesk and used Autodesk’s BIM360 (Building Information Modelling) tool to bring to life, in AR, a hospital that was under construction. Engineers could “see the future” and see through walls. They could see the layout of pipes, the planned progress of the next few days, ensure better quality control, etc. Space management, for example, was vastly improved.
BIM, in fact, is a fascinating subject unto itself. Autodesk describes BIM as “an intelligent 3D model-based process that gives architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) professionals insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage buildings and infrastructure.”
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Source: FirstPost