Architects are always looking at a design either on a physical model, a render or a draft. They are always interacting with the spaces to create and design beautiful projects. Imagine having the ability to explain their ideas interacting with those spaces in real time, avoiding costly mistakes, quality issues and delays on the project?
Most AEC professionals can agree that construction projects are becoming increasingly complex and expensive, putting managers under greater pressure to improve costs, timelines, and efficiency. For this reason, this new era of professionals must improve and articulate their communication process with technological advancement.
Building information modeling (BIM) and modeling capabilities have already changed the way projects are ideated, planned, budgeted and delivered. However, the most forward-thinking AEC firms are leveraging technologies like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and the fascinating and revolutionary, Mixed Reality because they can convert (BIM) data into a virtual reality experience.
AR, VR, MR: Decoding Realities
To fully understand the ways in which Mixed Reality can revolutionize the AEC industry, it’s important to find out where MR stands on the virtuality continuum. While most AEC professionals are already comfortable using immersive Virtual Reality tools like the Oculus Rift, VR is more useful during the design stage. Why? Because VR creates the immersive illusion of being in a virtual 3D environment with digital simulations that can help discover new insights into the design ideas.
“Mixed reality allows users to move digital objects onto physical spaces, and interact with the data using real-world gestures, gaze and voice commands.”
With augmented reality we are one step closer to the middle of the spectrum between the real and the virtual reality worlds by overlaying digital objects and information with the real environment. By using Augmented Reality on devices as simple as your own mobile phone, AR is a great and inexpensive solution for visualizing 3D models onsite. However, limited interactions between the virtual and the actual in AR stifles any possibility of real-time problem-solving.
Mixed reality is the only technology in which real and virtual content truly coexist on the same plane. Mixed reality allows users to actually move digital objects onto physical spaces, and interact intuitively with design data using real-world gestures, gaze and voice commands.
Build Smarter with MR
One of the biggest errors during the construction phase, is the design interpretation. Here is where MR comes and improves the design process, bringing 3D data off the screen and into the real world. Now in this new virtual space, AEC professionals can intuitively interact with potential clients and present a design idea in a simpler and more realistic way.
Back at the drawing board, MR helps AEC professionals make better decisions by understanding design consequences in real-time. All AEC pros can relate with the daily struggle of an undiscovered design flaw presenting itself during construction. With MR, this headache can be predicted before the construction begins resolving the inconsistencies in a virtual world rather than in the field.
A New Generation of Tools: The First Mixed Reality Multiplex
Kubity has become the first mixed reality multiplex for Autodesk Revit and SketchUp addicts; allowing instant visualization across multiple devices: desktop computers, smartphones, tablets, augmented reality gear, and virtual reality glasses.
Powered by a proprietary 3D crystallization engine known as “Paragone”, Kubity takes constrained information from a 3D file and runs it through the “BlockWave” algorithm; a multiphase optimization algorithm that combines 3D design, data compression, decimation and rendering optimization, web and mobile transfer, and mixed reality headset integration to create a crystallized universal format of the original file. The resulting crystallized file is unconstrained and playable across the multiplex in Mixed Reality with real-time rendering.
Introducing instantaneous and fluid 3D navigation for AEC professionals and their clients facilitates pre-construction design and construction site problem-solving while enhancing communications and workflow of any project from conception to completion.
AEC firms quick to embrace the game-changing technology of Mixed Reality and instant visualization across the multiplex will reap the rewards of smarter building.
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