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9 Cutting-Edge Technologies for Architects

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9 Cutting-Edge Technologies for Architects

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2017 has been an amazing year in the field of technology for architects. Most excitingly, we've seen an exponential growth in our fascination with virtual and augmented reality. Various types of innovative technology for architects are rolled out so regularly, we find our architect clients wondering where to begin.

Which of the many tech developments are merely gimmicks that will disappear as fast as they arrived, and which are here to stay, becoming permanent fixtures within professional practice? We've compiled a list of 10 pieces of technology for architects that will differentiate your firm from the competition in the studio and on the construction site.

Creating An Experience

Imagine, your architectural firm has been asked to come present your services to a prospective client. Your nerves are high with excitement, anxiety, and pure belief that this meeting will propel your architectural firm into the future. This client could drive your firm's growth for years to come.

You show up with a statement of qualifications, CAD drawings, and pictures of the tricked out projects your firm is so dearly proud of completing. You also arrive with the industry's cutting-edge technology to give your prospective client the experience of a lifetime.

You immerse them into the project and capture all of their senses. You not only hear their excitement as they "ooo" and "aah" but you engage with them as you direct them through the experience. Try these 10 products to create an experience and separate yourself from the pack!

Technology for Architects

The product's launch was propelled into the world spotlight when they digitally resurrected the late rapper Tupac Shakur and sparked 15 million YouTube views in 48 hours. They followed by a Mariah Carey hologram that launched in five cities throughout Europe at once.

How can you use MUSION in your architectural firm?

MUSION can immerse your clients through a 3D model and holographic setting. This gives stakeholders an opportunity to visualize a project before it is constructed. This cutting-edge technology for architects creates spectacular multi-media presentations using 3D holographic images. These images are so real they can hardly be distinguished from the presenters and live performers appearing next to them.

FUZOR is software that takes your project from conceptual design through construction. FUZOR is perfect for architects because it greatly speeds up the process to get designs into virtual reality. The software allows users to iterate and improve on their designs. Use this in your next client presentation and mesmerize them with your 3D approach to a streamlined construction process.

Bringing virtual reality full circle, literally. CURV technology captures the user's peripheral vision and offers a full sense of the VR experience. Give this to your potential client and conduct a full-scale walkthrough of your proposed design. CURV technology brings a collaboration amongst the group and further separates your firm from the crowd.

Born out of Japan, touchable holograms are working their way through production and refinement. Developers expect them to hit the shelves in Q3 of 2017. Touchable holograms are technology for architects to keep their eyes on, as there is nothing quite like this on the market yet. Imagine being able to not only see the project, but feel it as well. Sifting through spec books, samples, and any other materials will become an experience of the past.

Jaunt Virtual Reality Technology uses a camera system that simultaneously records 3D stereoscopic video in all directions. The video is coupled with 3D sound-field microphones to record sound. The Jaunt technology gives you the ability to reconstruct a complete visual and auditory experience.

Plot this device in the middle of your job site or even inside a completed project and capture 360-degree footage for your clients to enjoy later. Compatible with most VR lenses, this cutting-edge technology for architects allows users to experience and explore their projects on a whole new level!

Shapespark Technology is a technology for architects that creates real-time web-based visualizations with physically accurate lighting. The visualizations can be shared via links.

Shapespark supports the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, providing users with a stereoscopic 3D view. Offering this technology as a collaborative tool between your architectural firm and your clients gives clients the sense of ownership and involvement they yearn for.

For the budget-conscious architecture firm, Google Cardboard is a great way to impress your clients. Through pairing Google Cardboard with a compatible smartphone, one can experience "3D models" in a similar way to the Oculus Headset. Get it, fold it and look inside to enter the world of Cardboard. It's a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy. This technology for architects is an inexpensive way to provide a virtual reality experience to your clients.

Client meetings don't always happen in an office or conference room. Be prepared to go digital and display your ideas and works on the go with The Cube. The Cube is a miniature, mobile projector that transforms any screen into a 'cinematic experience' at the touch of a button. This item is fantastic to take on job sites or for presentations in a clients office rather than your own.

Winner of the best product at the VR & AR World Expo in London, Roto is an interactive Virtual Reality chair that allows individuals to explore in various directions in a VR environment. Have your design concepts built in before sending your client for the ride of a lifetime through their new environment, or their upcoming project. This technology for architects is sure to wow your customers and separate yourself from the competition.
Amanda Dixon is the Creative Director at Brantley Agency, a digital marketing and website design agency for Architects, Engineers and Commercial Contractors. From helping start-up firms get off the ground to revitalizing some of the world's largest architecture brands, Brantley is an expert in creating beautiful and functional websites. Amanda's portfolio of work has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among others.

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9 Cutting-Edge Technologies for Architects

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2017 has been an amazing year in the field of technology for architects. Most excitingly, we've seen an exponential growth in our fascination with virtual and augmented reality. Various types of innovative technology for architects are rolled out so regularly, we find our architect clients wondering where to begin.

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New York, NY - SEArch (Space Exploration Architecture) and Clouds AO (Clouds Architecture Office), an architecture and space research collective, were awarded the $25,000 top prize Sunday, September 27th in the NASA and America Makes sponsored competition 3D Printed Habitat Challenge for Mars. The competition asked teams to design a habitat for four crew members while highlighting 3D printing techniques and using material indigenous to Mars. Recognizing that water is the building block to life, the team used a ‘follow the water’ approach to conceptualize, site and construct their design. ICE HOUSE was born from the imperative to bring light and a connection to the outdoors into the vocabulary of Martian architecture. The winning proposal stood out as one of the few entries not to bury the habitat beneath regolith, instead mining the anticipated abundance of subsurface ice in the northern regions to create a thin vertical ice shell capable of protecting the interior habitat from radiation while celebrating life above ground.

ICE HOUSE was one of 30 designs to advance to the third round finals from an original 162, ultimately taking home first place ahead of entries from the European Space Agency and international firm Fosters and Partners. A 3D printed scaled model of the design was presented to the public at the Maker’s Faire September 26th and 27th. Throughout the challenge, the team also experimented with 3D ice prototyping, redefining traditional methods of 3D printing by instead relying on the physics of phase transition between solid and vapor states.

The SEArch / Clouds AO team, with ties to Pratt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Parsons School of Design, is comprised of eight noted designers including: Christina Ciardullo, Kelsey Lents, Jeffrey Montes, Michael Morris (project team leader) and Melodie Yashar of SEArch, and Ostap Rudakevych, Masayuki Sono, and Yuko Sono of Clouds AO. Consulting on the project are fourteen leading space related subject matter experts (SME’s) comprised of scientists, astrophysicists, geologists, structural and 3D printing engineers.

http://www.spacexarch.com/mars-ice-house/

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19 Futuristic Buildings from the 2016 World Architecture Festival

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This is what 2016's best architecture looks like.

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An interdisciplinary research project is keeping VR weird

From the outside, I look like the worst stereotype of a VR user as I walk around the Virginia Tech Cube. Not only am I blindfolded by an Oculus Rift as I feel my way around, the headset is sporting a 6-inch-high, slightly wobbly 3D-printed antenna. The Rift isn't wireless, so I'm tethered to a laptop, which a research assistant is carrying around behind me. My gait lurches from tentative single steps to single-minded strides to sudden stops - sometimes because I've clipped through a wall in virtual reality, sometimes because I'm about to run into one in real life.

A 50 x 40-foot box isn't even big enough to fit the scoreboard in Virginia Tech's Lane Stadium. But for me, the room looks like the giant venue, full of 60,000 spectators in the midst of evacuating. The audience is represented by tiny boxes, torrents of them streaming through a simple replica of one wing, mixing and jostling each other as they pass. If I walk slowly, I can match their pace. A little faster, and my speed multiplies, until walking briskly in the Cube shoots me through the stadium and straight into empty blue space.

These digital seven-league boots are just one piece of the massive puzzle that Benjamin Knapp, director of Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), and other researchers are trying to put together. In most of the tech world, virtual reality is slimming down and becoming more accessible, as developers learn to create simple experiences that anyone can enjoy. Inside the Cube, it's messy, complicated, and ambitious.

The Cube is a new initiative, but it fits with Virginia Tech's long history of virtual reality research. In the mid-'90s, the school unveiled a CAVE (a recursive acronym for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), a 10 x 10-foot enclosure with stereoscopic 3D images projected on every side. A successor to the CAVE - now called the Visionarium VisCube - is still around on campus, and two Cube researchers have previously worked on Visionarium projects.

You can almost feel the tremors as wind rips away nails and wood

Originally built as a black-box theater, the Cube is shared between ICAT and Virginia Tech's Center for the Arts, used for both art projects and scientific research. This doesn't necessarily have to involve VR; in 2013, the Cube theater hosted a live performance called Operacraft, where K-12 students used Minecraft avatars - projected onto a wall - to perform an opera sung by Virginia Tech musicians.

One of the Cube's biggest selling points is its sound system, which creates deafening 360-degree audio with 124 standard speakers, four subwoofers, and nine additional speakers that project hyper-targeted sound, like the aural equivalent of a spotlight. It's possible to create things that could never be replicated with an ordinary sound system, like an experimental composition by ICAT media engineer Tanner Upthegrove that sends metal and chainsaws whirling around the room and wouldn't feel out of place in Hellraiser. Close your eyes in another demo - a recording from inside a tornado - and you can almost feel the tremors as wind rips away nails and wood.

The Oculus Rift tracks head movement with a single webcam, which reads an array of LEDs embedded in the headset. Alongside the speakers, though, the Cube is lined with 24 cameras, which read up to 24 rigid-body targets - small constellations of dowels and reflective balls. Tape one to a tablet or headset, and the wall cameras will be able to "see" visitors as they explore anything from a very large molecule to a very small tornado, mapped onto the dimensions of the room. "The beauty of the space is that you now move through a virtual world by walking," says Knapp. "I can explore this area in this space, and the model in this space, with you in there - and with anybody else."

A non-VR project called FutureHaus, for example, uses an old augmented reality trick: by holding up a tablet, you're given a window into a simply rendered three-story home, its dimensions mapped roughly to the room. Unlike most other virtual rooms, though, whole groups of people can mill around the house, where they'll appear as Prisoner-esque white spheres. FutureHaus drives home the loose connection between physical and virtual space in an almost eerie way. You can explore the house by climbing virtual staircases, sending your avatar up or down while you traverse the exact same space in the Cube. If you head to another floor and a companion stays behind on the lower level, you could hold hands and chat while your avatars walk several stories apart.

A tornado visualization tool - unrelated to the audio installation - works with space in another way. Put on the Rift and you're standing in a room about the size of the cube, getting a bird's-eye view of a flat map. Instead of empty space, though, you're looking at a bright, abstract funnel made of reds and yellows, representing the temperature of the air as a tornado sweeps across the ground. You can walk through it or kneel and see tiny topographic lines, while rocks and wind whirl around you in a small artistic flourish. Right now, it processes pre-recorded weather data, but one day it could provide a live feed, creating a real-time record of a disaster.

The most interesting part, though, isn't the image, which feels about as informative as a normal 3D render. It's the sense of place. The simulation represents users as hovering green pyramids, tipped forward like an arrow. As I stood on the map, another pyramid floated toward me, representing Virginia Tech Department of Geography head Bill Carstensen. When Carstensen pointed out the eye of the storm by staring at it, he could have been poking at a screen, or drawing a red line in MS Paint. But actually peering through the 3D landscape, I could respond with the most intuitive interface of all: my own body. The demo was simplistic, but where so much VR feels like a blown-up version of a thing I could get on a screen, it gave me a real reason to use it.

Designing for the Cube, though, presents its own set of challenges. There's a tremendous amount of space to track, and since everything has to be portable, you can't rely on having a super-high-powered PC to render environments. Normally, being able to walk around is a great way to avoid motion sickness. But the clunky FutureHaus demo sometimes ran at only a few frames per second, and the Lane Stadium evacuation simulator could get nauseatingly laggy. The Oculus Rift is currently hooked to a ThinkPad, which must be carried around, open, at all times. The next step will be putting the ThinkPad into a backpack, and after that, the team is looking at streaming video through a Raspberry Pi, which would make the headsets truly mobile. If you want to track fine motion, like hands, you'd have to strap on a Leap Motion or some other controller.

For now, walking around in the Cube in a headset feels simultaneously retro and futuristic: you're using a system that overwrites real space in a way that Valve and Oculus and Sony will never match, but in a bulky, awkward format straight out of a '90s X-Files episode.

Knapp is aware of these limitations. But even as researchers work to fix them, he's imagining huge conceptual leaps. One Virginia Tech student, for example, is working on a system that could detect muscle movement and translate it into motion controls - instead of having to look for a gesture, the room would know that you'd flexed to pick up a cup. And unlike Oculus and many others, Knapp doesn't just want virtual or augmented reality glasses to get smaller. He wants them to disappear altogether.

"The crazy distant future is to shine laser light into the eyes themselves."

"The crazy distant future is to shine laser light into the eyes themselves," he says, while we're talking about interfaces. At first, this sounds like a virtual retinal display, the same technology that's thought to be used in Microsoft's Hololens and the mysterious Magic Leap headset. In reality, it's a lot weirder: putting projectors on the walls, not a headset and using sophisticated tracking to beam images directly into your eyes. "Just like the aural environment doesn't touch you - you don't have to wear anything to get the aural environment - wouldn't it be neat if you didn't have to do that with the visual environment? Right now we've moved [from a] screen onto commercially available devices like the Oculus," or next-generation headsets like Magic Leap. "But the eventual goal is to move all of that off-body."

Is that the future? A virtual reality theater where speakers are targeted to your precise location and sensors track your muscles, while the walls shine lasers into your eyes? Not for most people. Maybe not for anybody. But as far as wild VR experiments go, things don't get much better than this.

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Step into the Cube: Virginia Tech's giant virtual reality room

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From the outside, I look like the worst stereotype of a VR user as I walk around the Virginia Tech Cube. Not only am I blindfolded by an Oculus Rift as I feel my way around, the headset is sporting...

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