Designers Enter the Third Dimension With VR

Written by Brian Libby

It’s a rainy morning at a downtown Portland coffee shop when I strap on a Virtual Reality headset offered to me by Matthew Shaffer, managing partner of radical galaxy studio.

A Bellevue, Washington-based virtual reality consultancy and creative studio, RGS helps architects, developers, and clients immerse themselves—virtually—in the worlds of their designs. Suddenly, the tiny café gives way to a 17,000-squarefoot house that I can digitally walk through and arrange with the touch of a button, redesigning rooms and swapping finishes to suit my tastes. With one click, wood flooring in a hallway becomes tile. With another, a granite countertop in the kitchen changes to quartz.

“It’s that feeling of being there that you can’t get any other way,” Shaffer says. “When clients put on a VR headset, they are fully immersed in their future home, with all the materials and finishes built out exactly to their wishes.” Even the most seasoned professional can’t always anticipate how a building or interior will look or feel when completed, and once a structure has been realized, it’s often too late (or too expensive) to

go back and revise. VR allows both architects and designers— as well as the people who will live and work in the structures they plan out—to fully experience a project before they even break ground. According to Shaffer, “It’s the best way to design any project and reduce change orders while saving clients time and money.”

Until recently, users of VR and augmented reality (a sister technology that superimposes computer-generated elements onto real-world imagery) described their environments as not entirely, well, realistic. VR technology first emerged in the 1960s; two decades later, computer scientist Jaron Lanier founded the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves, and it has been studied by NASA at its Ames Research Center. Initially it offered only an experience similar to stepping into a video game. “Three years ago, when a consultant created a VR model for one of our projects, you would put on the goggles and sense that you were in a 3D space, but it was primitive,” explains Michael Tingley, a principal with Portland’s Bora Architects, a firm that uses VR to share designs with clients. “Now it feels like you’re really in the space.”

For developers and builders such as Lochwood Lozier Custom Homes in Redmond, Washington, the value of VR is its ability to help clients acclimate to their new environment. “So many people are not visual,” says the company’s president, Todd Lozier. “Looking at a set of 2D plans wasn’t doing it for them.” VR changed all that, he says. “Sometimes we’ve had clients view their project in VR and say, ‘Wow, that’s not what I expected the space to look like.’ But even then, it’s a good thing, because we can go back and adjust the design.” And while rendering a client’s home in 3D does incur additional costs, Lozier says the feedback from his clients has been that it’s money well spent. “More than anything, expectations are the number-one component of a happy relationship with customers,” Lozier says. “Being able to visualize the end product accurately makes it easier to move ahead.”While VR is providing creative solutions for clients, equally intriguing is its burgeoning role in the initial stages of the design process. “If we’re in a conference room, looking at a model on a screen, we can see it in VR in a matter of minutes,” says John DeForest of Seattle’s DeForest Architects. “We can ask, ‘I wonder what it would be like if we extended this overhang?’ and, once we design it in CAD, you can experience it in VR. It enables clients to evaluate spaces more intuitively, and also supports our mission of giving clients the tools to be active partners in the design process.”

Despite the clear benefits of the new technology, some designers caution that virtual and augmented reality should not replace age-old visualization tools such as hand drawing and real models. “Working with physical models reveals things you won’t see in a virtual representation. There is an ability to scale, to convey specific information you want the client to focus on in a way that’s different from VR,” Bora’s Tingley says. “Keeping all those tools in the design kit is important. I can’t imagine a world where every decision is made solely through a digital method. It would impoverish the design process.”

Even so, says Radical Galaxy’s Shaffer as he unplugs the pair of VR goggles from his laptop, “I’ve been on the road for the last year going city to city meeting developers and architecture firms. Just showing them what could be done with VR, and hearing their feedback, it’s just so clear this is the way the industry is going. The mouse trap’s gonna change.”