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DESIGNERS ENTER THE THIRD DIMENSION WITH VR 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
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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.”
THIS PAGE: BORA ARCHITECTS; OPPOSITE: RADICAL GALAXY STUDIO
Written by BRIAN LIBBY
