Building design in VR
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
Do you recognize this feeling? You are working on a report or a text document, and you proofread it 10 times without finding any errors, and then send it to the printer. While proofreading the physical copy, you often discover several issues within seconds or minutes, that you have been staring at on the screen, completely unable to see. It has happened to me more times than I can count. Moral of the story; By engaging other neural pathways in your brain, you will bring new insights even with very familiar input data. Tonight, I had just that experience in VR.
I have been working with the acoustic design of a big school since last year, and now we are approaching the final delivery. In the last phase, everyone reviews each other’s documents and drawings one final and thorough time before they are approved to be sent to a building site. I have been using VREX for a several years now, and for reviewing purposes I find it to be an invaluable tool. It is eerily similar to conducting a virtual site visit. And I always find new issues when reviewing in VR, that usually have been in front of me for months on the regular computer screen.
I am a strong proponent of 3D models in acoustic design. It makes so much more sense to me, compared to 2D drawings. Sure, they also have their place and purpose, but not on their own. Sound propagation takes places in three dimensions and therefore, it is very easy to forget about construction paths that are not easily seen on a 2D plan or section drawing. But when you load up a 3D model on the screen and turn it around a bit, those transmission paths often become much easier to see and understand.
But even 3D projection on a flat screen is not enough for proper understanding, at least not for me. Especially when you have complex installations with ventilation ducts all over the place that obstruct one another. Sometimes it can be very difficult to apply clipping planes properly to see a certain junction or installation that you want to review. With stereoscopic 3D however, you get real depth perception, and this helps so much with this problem. It feels so natural to simply move your head around a bit too see what is behind an obstruction. A lot easier to understand! And here, I usually get that same feeling as the first time I print out on paper the document I want to proofread.
Another killer feature in VREX is the ability to load scale models. This is usually where I start when conducting a thorough building/project review. I load the world in 1:40 or thereabouts and then I become Gulliver in front of a tiny and hyper-detailed model of the school or whatever. Everything becomes sharper when you shrink it. This is akin to looking at whole plane drawings on the screen. Except you get it with real depth perception for the first time. After a run-through of the whole building, floor plan by floor plan, I go back to world scale 1:1. Now I move in close on specific junctions or details that need further optimization.
The only major drawback I have with VREX is that I would like to print out the room ID numbers and names in the virtual world. Kind of like referencing and mapping an architecture dwg on the various floors. I keep my fingers crossed that this functionality will arrive before long. Now, I need to memorize each room and what they do. This is usually no problem when you have been working with a project for several months and go into VR in a late review process. To use VR in an early stage is more cumbersome, because you haven’t been able to learn the room ID’s yet. In this case, I get more mileage out of Trimble connect, where I can reference dwgs on the floor elements with all relevant information. But what you can do, is to do that virtual site visit, and get a feeling for the biggest rooms and the most sensitive ones.
If you have the possibility to try out building design in VR, I highly recommend it. It’s a personality thing also of course, but for me it has been revolutionary.