Collaborative design with Arkio Arkio is a VR-centric collaborative design system for AEC professionals. Regulars at our NXT BLD conference will have seen it develop from a conceptual idea to an affordable real-life product which has just been released. We talked to the developers about the journey
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n 2017, while looking for interesting VR interview with Ernesto Pacheco, assotechnologies to show at our first ciate, director of visualisation at NXT BLD conference, we came CannonDesign (tinyurl.com/Arkio-NXT) across a young architect called It’s interesting that the launch of Arkio Johan Hanegraaf, who taught himself proper comes around the same time as how to program in Unity and pondered Nvidia Omniverse gets its first real pubwhat a VR design system for architects lic airing (see page 18). Collaboration is a would look like. problem in our industry because of a He gave a great demonstration (tinyurl. lack of openness, lack of standards and com/Hanegraaf), which captured all of our inability of companies to decide on comimaginations. The day mon tools. after the event, Foster + Nvidia’s impressive Partners invited him to solution costs tens of Over time we have a deeper dive. thousands of dollars and envision people In the years that folcan use cloud-based designing more lowed we kept in touch instances with powerful with Johan and saw the and more complex Nvidia RTX GPUs. By concept slowly turn into a contrast, Arkio costs from architecture real-life product at ‘free’ to just tens of dollars inside Arkio and a month per user and runs Icelandic company Arkio. we look forward on your desktop with a As VP of product Johan teamed up with CEO to making full use low-cost VR headset and, Hilmar Gunnarsson and Omniverse, you of the parametric unlike CTO Haraldur Darri can actually model inside nature of our Thorvaldsson (aka Harri), it. Arkio is collaboration modelling kernel for the masses and affordwho were industry veterans in collaboration, modable to have on every elling and 3D printing. It’s designer’s seat. been three years of development and We will have an in-depth review in the Arkio, the product, is now set to launch. next edition of AEC Magazine but with In October last year delegates of NXT the launch upon us, we asked the develBLD Virtual were treated to a demonstra- opment team - Johan, Hilmar and Harri tion of the beta version, together with a about the journey to get to this point.
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AEC Magazine: How did you all meet and set about developing Arkio? Hilmar: Harri and I have been working together since 2013 when we created Modio, a 3D modelling tool that enabled anyone to design toys on a tablet or phone and 3D print them. We sold Modio to Autodesk in 2014 and spent two years at Autodesk following the acquisition. After leaving Autodesk we asked ourselves what would be a fun and superambitious project to take on? Even though I’m not an architect I have always been fascinated by architecture and I wanted to somehow combine this with my passion for advanced technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and create intuitive user experiences. And so it began, the first process of imaging how we could use the power of VR to make architectural design easier. www.AECmag.com
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