White Paper

White Paper

This paper has the purpose to give the basic information to those who have just discovered the field of VR and AR in Architecture and want to know more. It is a revolutionary moment in the history of Virtual and Augmented reality, the future is just about to be discovered.

The world of virtual reality is growing rapidly. At the time of writing (March 2017) Google said it had delivered over 10 million of its cheap Cardboard virtual reality headsets since their debut in 2014. “Augmented and Virtual Reality revenue forecast revised to hit $120 billion by 2020. January 2016” (Source www.digi-capital.com). Hundreds of different types of headset have been released from many companies, Oculus Rift was the pioneering first one of the new age of VR, followed by many others.

The past

Virtual and augmented reality have already been explored since the Fifties, but was in the Nineties that we began to see usable devices coming on the market, mostly about gaming and entertainment. The big shift into a popular use of VR devices happened in 2014 with the incredible rising of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign done by Palmer Luckey and Google began to deliver the Cardboard who brought the dream of Virtual Reality into what is called nowadays the “Real” reality.

The present

In such a short time, from 2014 till now we assisted at an incredible developing of any kind of research in terms of hardware, software and fields of application. Some of these are  Design, Architecture, Real Estate, Museums design, Exhibition design and Cultural Heritage.

The future

From a survey conducted in 2016 by CGarchitect based on interviewing 376 firms in the Archiviz Industry 69% of them are currently using VR/AR/MR in production and 77% is experimenting or planning to use it in the next future.  

VR/AR/MR seems to be the future of visualisation in architecture.

Glossary

Virtual reality

Is usually called VR and it stands for the recreation of a three-dimensional realistic virtual world to give an immersive experience where the user can move and interact with the environment via game controller. Different model of headset give different possibilities to interact with environment. You can walk in a certain range of space that can be just a two square meters tille a six by four room experience depending on the model of the visor. Some of the most recent devices give you haptic feedback like force, vibrations and tools to select instruments to interact with the objects and the environment.

Augmented reality

The acronym AR stands for augmented reality and it means the possibility to add sounds, computer graphic, videos or interfaces to the physical real world environment. Under this category are classified all the smartglasses beginning from Google glasses to the more recent Hololens from MIcrosoft, Meta or Magic Leap.

Mixed reality

Real-time rendering

In computer graphics it means the ability of the computer to create images fast enough to allow users to interact with an artificial environment. It was first developed in gaming but now it can be used to let users to explore 3d rendered spaces or objects and change details

Fov

Fov stands for “field of view” and is the parameter that gives you the immersive feeling to be surrounded by the augmented or virtual environment.

Headsets:

Different types of Headset for Virtual Reality:

Smartphone- based  headset (Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear, Zeiss One, Homido just to cite some of them)

Computer-based headset (Oculus Rift, Htc Vive)

Different types of Headset for Virtual Reality

(Microsoft Hololens, Meta, Moverio Epson)

Different contents

360° images

These images are intended to be viewed with any kind of cardboard. The more is sophisticated the headset the most immersive experience you have. You cannot move into virtual or real space, you just watch around you and live an immersive experience. In this case you can create

360° videos

interactive environment for smartphone based headset

interactive environment for computer based based headset.

Interactive games

Content for Augmented reality

3D interactive environment