This month The Wild, a new VR solution we have written about here and relatively new in the AEC market, has announced a new update that brings in speech-to-text for commenting on design reviews in immersive experiences.
The Wild
The Wild enables teams to experience design together, in real time, from anywhere in the world. Now, when schedules and timezones don’t align, users of The Wild—namely, architects and other design professionals using Revit and SketchUp—can collaborate asynchronously with their teams and stakeholders using the new speech-to-text annotations in space functions.
“VR is great for a lot of things, but typing is not one of them. It’s bulky, frustrating, and inefficient,” according to The Wild Design Director Melissa Chan. “We want The Wild to be a place where people can communicate easily and naturally—that’s why our Comment tool uses speech-to-text to record and transcribe your comments.”
01 – The Wild has introduced speech-to-text annotation commenting tools to their immersive VR solution.
With the Comment tool, a user can leave annotations throughout the space for others to see. The name and profile image are attached to the comment, so the teammates know who it’s from. By pulling the VR control trigger and speaking into it, the comment is transcribed and becomes an object that can be moved, placed, and scaled in the space. These annotations will also be visible from the desktop viewer, meaning a VR headset is not required to view them.
MORE: ‘The Wild’ Is Compelling New AR-VR Software Solution for Mac and Windows
“While you’re experiencing your model in The Wild, the Comment tool will help you and your architecture or design team communicate with one another,” Chan adds. “You can get answers to your questions and provide helpful feedback and annotations for your team. Leaving spatial comments in context helps your team align on decisions and collaborate more effectively within your space.”
To learn more about The Wild read our other article here or visit them online.
Architosh Analysis and Commentary
Asynchronous communication is essentially how social media works in today’s modern web. We post shares of information to our base of people and they catch up when they have logged in. This issue of non-alignment is what another VR software executive noted about their solution’s ability to provide asynchronous communication. (see: Architosh: “Early Access: Real-Time or Your-Time: How Visual Vocal Can Change the AR/VR Landscape in AEC,” 8 Apri 2019)
It is delightful to see this new speech-to-text asynchronous added to The Wild’s already inventive and engaging UX-UI combination. At Architosh we are starting to see the VR/AR platforms are potential acquisition targets for the large online meeting communication platforms (eg: Citrix’s GoTo Meeting, et al) providers because fundamentally what this technology is doing is offering a superior way meet on projects with your project stakeholders. Another possibility is that solution providers like The Wild are M&A targets for the larger BIM providers because you could embed this functionality into a BIM solution and it could dovetail with the BIM Collaborative Format (BCF). Think of entering a BIM model through a tool like Solibri, for example, but wearing a VR headset and encountering not only these various types of annotations (including voice) but BCF links.
Anyway, you can see The Wild here in action featuring the new speech-to-text annotation features.
