The Future of VR/AR—The Growing Demand for Creators of Places

This article is also co-authored by Kevin Cahill. 

There is a lot of talk and hype about what is happening in the world of virtual or augmented reality, but do we really understand where it is headed? And how will we participate either as a user or creator of this virtual or augmented world?

But here is what we now know. Architects and engineers are going to see a big demand in the future for creative talent to help design these worlds and places.

The Key Summit of the Year for VR/AR

Unity put together a VR/AR Summit for enthusiasts, professionals, investors, and architects engineers who were trying to understand where they fit in this new technology.

Alan Robles from Gensler said, “Architects and designers are going to be important in VR as they will design the place.” What is a world without a place? Robles spoke at a breakout session titled, “An Emerging Technology Future” and he spoke of Gensler—one of the world’s largest architecture firms—becoming just as much a technology company as a design firm. At this point, he says, their focus is AR (augmented reality) and Gensler is prepared for the change in technology, as it will change the way they design. (image 01)

The “Vision VR/AR Summit” in 2016 was such a success, Unity decided to host a second conference delivering even more creative, technical and business insights. Architecture, a  professional discipline, was a focus of three of the Breakout panels. NASA JPL showed how they could interact with engineering projects using Protospace. The keynote for the summit had some of the best minds in VR/AR. VR/AR creation is platform agnostic with a lot of development on Apple’s macOS and iOS platforms.

So this is a good time to become familiar with these tools as VR is a growing market and it can help clients see design in a much more intuitive and immersive way.

Conference Breakout Sessions

This conference offered Breakout sessions like:

• “Massive Mixed Reality – Leveraging Large 3D models with mobile XR” (focus on huge architectural files and porting them to Unity),
• “Architects and the future of AR Design” with Alan Robles from Gensler
• “Unity Beyond Games (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction)” speakers included Alan Robles (Gensler), Will Adams (Mortenson), and (HGA).

Unlike other similar conferences, where you feel you can’t relate to the speakers, this conference had a more intimate feel with a more personal tone. Cheers and applauds after each speaker let you know that the attendees were inspired and ready to embrace this technology.

Conference Opening Keynote

Tony Parisi, head of VR and AR strategy at Unity Technologies, opened the Keynote with a high energy speech about how development should be a democracy and accessible to all—how people are using VR and AR to help instruct people how to build things.

Tony then introduced John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity Technologies, who brought up the point of how do we get VR/AR technologies out to everyone; price (under $1000 dollars), mobility, and content. After this brief speech, he introduced legendary Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins who naturally had something intriguing to say about this new evolution in tech. (see image 02)

VR Is Millions of Years Old

Richard Dawkins felt that virtual reality was actually a concept that is millions of years old. He asked the audience to consider the idea—that virtual reality was run by software in the brain. Our reality, he says is “part of a constructed model world” created by a filter in our brain that processes large amounts of unadulterated data, much like how VR creates a reality using software and hardware.

Dawkins talked about how a species constructs the virtual world it needs to favor survival. He asked the question, “Do bats hear in color?” The bats’ senses adapted to survive in this world and how they must perceive it very differently than humans do. Their reality is somewhat of a virtual reality. Evolution is indeed versatile with intelligent design; he presented example after example from the animal and human world.

New Features in Unity

Once his speech was done, Parisi came back to the stage with some announcements about new features in Unity including improved lighting, single pass stereo, with integration with VRWorks from NVIDIA and Text Mesh Pro support.

MORE: Strata Intros VR17 Release—For Flagship Strata Design 3D CX Application

We were shown an example created by Mirada showcasing a VR piece that had CG elements and live-action layers that seamlessly worked together in a scene. All the layers of elements were easy to edit and change within Unity. Architects would appreciate this piece as a (live action) gazebo was brought to life with CGI seagulls that gave the space life. The landscape for architectural design is changing, as virtual worlds will demand these skills for creating designs of spaces and places in VR/AR.

Finally, Natalie Grant, Senior Product Manager of VR/AR, took the stage to show a 360 video with animated objects using new video playback features in Unity.

After the link, the next page runs through the many companies at the 2017 VR/AR Summit and what they discussed, announced, or are working on.

next page: VR/AR Announcements By Companies: Audi, NASA JPL, Facebook, and More…

The VR/AR Summit featured the biggest names and companies in the worlds of VR and AR. Below we summarize key announcements by company.

A Mighty Kingdom

Sarah Strumbo, VR/AR evangelist took to the stage with Mike Wuetherick, Product Manager at Unity, to show off a game created in Unity called “A Mighty Kingdom” and show a player could interact in the world and on the fly create changes to the world. She showed off at tiny peek at a new feature called Timeline. Timeline is similar to Adobe After Effects (AE) using a timeline to control changes. Sarah built little models on the fly while wearing her headset to create a defense against an attack. The results were pretty cool stuff!

Within

Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk are the founders of “Within” their common love for art and storytelling brought them together to create technologies and stories in VR.

Chris Milk may be familiar to film fans as he was featured at Sundance many times at their New Frontier Labs. “Within” created this outstanding interactive experience in Unity called “The Life of Us” where you and your friends enter a virtual reality world where you evolve and change while creating memories as you take this journey of evolution. Once you enter the world, everything about your identity changes as you follow this new adventure beyond your own reality. Again, architects reading this can appreciate the notion of building worlds and spaces and, perhaps, with spaces and elements that a VR enthusiasts can explore and appreciate.

Facebook

For all you social media enthusiasts, Rachel Franklin, Head of Social VR at Facebook, announced that Facebook Spaces—which is relatively quite new on the social media giant’s map and in beta stage—was created with Unity.

She said that Unity was a perfect match for Facebook and that the next generation of interactive experiences will be built with people at the center. Facebook Spaces promotes “social experiences” in an interactive way that brings an intimacy to user relationships and gives them a way to express themselves at a more personal level. We are not entirely sure where that is going and what that all means but it means at the very least that VR experiences via FB Spaces will involve multiple social media contacts.

NFL Films

Senior Producer Jason Weber, from NFL Films, demonstrated how much football has changed since 1962. He debuted never before seen footage of a 360 degree video of Super Bowl 2017.

He spoke about how Unity was a tool of choice with the flexibility necessary to work effectively with content.

Microsoft

Like Apple, Microsoft seems to be putting more of their efforts or beliefs in these new technologies in the augmented reality (AR) side. Brandon Bray, Principal Group Program Manager, of Hololens, announced that 91% of all applications created for Hololens were created in Unity.

He also unveiled Mixed Reality (MR, which ads to VR and AR), which will soon be available for Unity developers as well. You really grasped the power of the Hololens when he showed a couple picking out a couch in their living room using the Hololens to put the couch in their actual space virtually. They could change its location and perhaps even choose another couch without leaving their actual living room to add furniture to their home. (see image 03 above)

This is the exact technology that is going to make a huge impact for architects and designers. Bray also took us on an adventure through an architectural home and showed us how Mixed Reality worked by putting a live-action program on the wall. It was brilliant. Bray was greeted with a loud applause from the audience when he said everyone in the audience would receive an Acer MR headset this coming summer.

Scope

Scott Montgomerie, CEO, and co-founder of Scope, has 15 years of experience in consumer software and AR experience that he brings to his new company—Scope—trying to create a better world by solving complex problems.

He talked about the balance of creating in AR including cost, technology risk and scale. Scope creates WorkLink and Remote AR, technologies that allow companies to train people with the right support and guidance. They make it for any device that is easiest to use. Scope too uses Unity to develop these applications. You can train someone how to build a room with a set of VR goggles and an app that demonstrates how it is done. It is faster, more efficient, and easy for someone to know exactly what you want. If you have construction drawings with a custom design, this is a great solution to show someone how to do it without a long explanation of how.

JPL

Victor Lou, Operations Lead at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with his colleagues, showed off the Mars Rover 2020 during a demo using Microsoft Hololens mixed reality tool ProtoSpace.

ProtoSpace is a tool used by NASA JPL to solve complex problems with the use of Mixed Reality—engineering problems so hard that 2D drawings or 3D models can’t quite produce the results they need. Victor put on the headset and walked around the Mars Rover. While using his hands he could interactively interact with the rover and if he saw a problem, he could show an engineer in real time and say this needs to be fixed or changed. This helps NASA save time and solve problems faster than traditional engineering drawings. This is an example of next-generation thinking with these latest technologies.

AUDI

Marcus Kuehne, Strategy Lead Immersive Technologies at Audi, and Chris O’Connor, Technical Lead at Zero Light, spoke at the keynote and did a Breakout session as well. Audi created a solution to a common problem for many auto dealers. How can we create an experience that will bring more customers into our showroom? How can we make this better? (image 04)

These were the core questions Audi asked. The company answered by creating an immersive VR experience for their customers so they could interact with the car of their dream in a meaningful way. Customers could customize their car and see exactly what it looked like after those customizations.

This technology offers real-time video compositing and is rendered in real-time with millions of vehicle configurations.

Audi had to find a way to offer beautiful models of their cards in VR without sacrificing quality and latency issues. Chris from Zero Light brought up a very interesting point that in order to protect Audi’s design copyrights, they had to keep all the assets in the cloud, so nothing is downloaded onto the user’s computer.

Red Bull and Rewind

Sol Rogers, CEO and Founder of Rewind gave an impressive presentation and Breakout session with innovative, interactive VR experiences in “Flight Deck” for Red Bull.

Unity and Hololens powered the holographic imagery. This presentation gave people the ability to get closer to the fastest flying sport hosted by Red Bull. It sat on a coffee table. You chose the flyer, the plane, and the course. You can actually have the full sized plane to view in your living room. Sol explained that there was a limit of 70,000 for the geometry in Hololens at the moment but that would change in the future allowing even larger scale projects.

next page: Multiverse, Google and more on Gensler and VR within Architecture

This is the third and final page in our extensive show report on the VR/AR Summit for 2017. We are going to look next at Multiverse, then Google’s VR plans and finally. And appendix to this report follows below and will cover some companies in this space most have not heard about before.

Multiverse

Freeman Fan, founder, and CEO of Multiverse was greeted with a huge applause. Multiverse is a studio create large-scale VR games with intuitive gameplay. He showed a peek at a level in his new RPG/FPS “Seeking Dawn.” (image 05)

He talked about game design in Unity. He talked about how body awareness and movement was key in developing a sense of the VR world feeling real. He spoke about the obstacles of storytelling in VR and solving this. Definitely look up his company. Who is going to build these spaces and worlds, as this offers new opportunities for those in design environments?

Google

Nathan Martz, Daydream Developer Platform Product Manager for Google, announced that Unity is now integrated with Google Tango, Google Cardboard, and Daydream.

Nathan said that Google announced a new update that will allow creators to test VR and AR changes in their app in minutes using Unity. Nathan was previously with Double Fine Studios and Lucas Arts Games.

Wrap-Up—Finally A Word About Oculus

After all these keynote speakers were done, John Riccitiello returned to the stage and with loud applause as he introduced his next guest Brendon Iribe, he is the Co-Founder and Vice President of PC VR, Oculus.

He has in the past been the CEO of Oculus VR when they first launched and later stepped down to lead the PC VR division as it’s VP. He and Palmer Luckey started a Kickstarter Campaign in 2012 for the Oculus Rift VR headset that brought in $2.4 million in investment, one of the most successful campaigns ever.

Architecture and VR/AR Are Meant For Each Other

John and Brendon talked about the industry, and Brendon said he thinks architecture and VR/AR were meant for each other. Iribe said at first when one of his employees tried to show him a walk through, he blew it off but after putting on the headset realized the immense potential this technology had for architects.

This, of course, leads us to Alan Robles, Associate & Experience Designer at Gensler. Robles did an incredible Breakout Session titled “Architects and the future of AR Design.” Robles spoke about how augmented reality (AR) is a focus for Gensler and how people are processing a lot of information in the process of architecture and how that data is collective and extended beyond them.

Robles said the accumulation of this data from our devices is being processed to understand our choices and that technology, in general, is changing how we interact with the world and how we have had to adapt and evolve. “Technology is changing how we design,” said Robles.  “Places are very important” he added and the role of the architect is going to be instrumental in designing of “place” in the worlds of AR and VR. We are all interconnected through our devices and this was going to change how we live our lives.

 

next page: Addenda—Massive Mixed Reality with Polygons to Triangles for Large Scale Architecture VR…and More

Appendix

Massive Mixed Reality

We have to consider technology as part of our design process. This was the message from Rene Schulte from Valorem in the Breakout session “Massive Mixed Reality – Leveraging Large 3D models with mobile XR,” as she spoke about all the different ways architects and engineers with huge models had to reduce the size of their models for mobile devices.

Polygons had to be converted to triangles. Manual optimization is too time consuming and expensive so he recommended tools like Simplygon and Umbra. Umbra was his choice for the best optimization.

These are new tools and you can learn more about Simplygon and Umbra here. Simplygon is by Simplygon Studios and the company says it is the gold standard for automated 3D optimization. The solution runs on Windows 10 and has two price offerings, a free version, and a $25,000 version. It works with FBX, OBJ, STL and has workflow integrations with Max, Maya, Unity and Standard UE4.

Umbra is Simplygon’s rival and essentially does the same thing—automatically optimizes any 3D content allowing you to choose between graphical fidelity or real-time performance, to be displayed on any device.

The goal of these tools is to optimize frame rates for moving 3D imagery (like in games or interactive 3D) or increase details. Umbra renders only what is visible to the user or player. Their licensing model is oriented at both games and enterprise and with just one click, says Umbra, you can deploy anything from massive point clouds to complex BIMs to any device or platform.

Other VR/AR Tech

There were other interesting presentations at the 2017 VR/AR Summit. We have covered most of the biggest players and discussions but others were present with important offerings and messages about the industry.

New Frontier Labs

Hussain Currimbhoy, Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and Kamal Sinclair of the Sundance Institute, New Frontier Labs talked about how VR/AR was changing how filmmakers created. They showed several film projects that were part of the New Frontier Labs that looks for new ways to express storytelling using new technology including VR.

The VOID

Cliff Plumer, CEO of THE VOID, is an entertainment industry veteran who has been the CEO of Digital Domain and the CTO of Lucas Film.

THE VOID creates layered virtual worlds over physical spaces to create immersive spaces that customers can interact with that engage them into exploration of the world. It gives them the ability to connect with characters, the story, and the virtual space. THE VOID creates immersive exploration that you can enjoy with your friends.

Unity is one of the tools that help THE VOID create these immersive experiences. Chris states, “Sell tickets, not hardware” as their motto. This gives a new creative design venue for architects and engineers with unlimited potential.

Baobab Studios

Maureen Fan is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studios; Baobab is the industry leading animation studio in VR.

The animation “Invasion” starring Ethan Hawke received critical acclaim with Roth Kirschenbaum Films signed to adapt it into a feature film. Baobab is a favorite on the film festival circuit.  This film is one of the most downloaded experiences on VR players like Oculus, Samsung, Within, Hulu and more.

ASTEROIDS, their second film featuring Elizabeth Banks was a 2017 Sundance Film Festival Selection and their latest film Rainbow Crow starring John Legend can be seen at Tribeca Film Festival this year. Maureen has been a VP at Zynga.  She spoke of how they use Unity in their development process in their animated VR films.

The Spiraloid Workshop Company

Bay Raitt is the CEO and founder of Spiraloid Workshop Company; he is an avid comic book fan. He is best known for his work creating Gollum for the Lord of the Rings movies, plus he spent ten years at Valve where he created fifty short films and the Source Filmmaker.

He is excited about his work at the Spiraloid Workshop using Unity on his latest comic project to give an immersive interactive experience to people reading his comics. He is inspiring a new generation of creative who can create cross-media experiences. He shared a sneak preview of Nanite Fulcrum.

Vuforia Smart Terrain

Jay Wright, President of Vuforia, the leading software development for augmented reality applications.

Over 40,000 applications used Vuforia for development. He announced a new feature for Tango enable devices. Vuforia Smart Terrain will give developers the ability to build AR experiences that interact with the world around them.

Using Vuforia Smart Terrain with Tango he was able to show off a Mars card game pointing your tablet at one of the Mars cards and transforming the stage into Mars where the objects on the card recognized the terrain as they interacted with it. Imagine this when designing a home or a building?  —- AKIKO ASHLEY, Associate Editor.