The dos and don’ts of mail retention

Pass through modelling in Arkio

Arkio has a new transparent material called pass-through, which allows you to see the edges of the geometry in passthrough camera mode. If you punch a hole through any of these walls, the view is of the VR world beyond. So you’re in a real room, seeing a live feed from a camera, but the view through the window is of the Arkio VR world. This is mildly disconcerting. It’s also possible to model rectangles around the furniture in your room and literally delete it and replace the furniture with Arkio components. So now you can edit the real world, and place virtual furniture within it, while looking out into the virtual world beyond!

The next generation of headsets will have full colour pass-through and, hopefully, higher resolution. This blended reality capability is really at a formative stage but gives an indication of where Arkio is heading. The development team said they always envisaged the product to be both VR and AR, so as AR glasses come out, expect to see Arkio models blending in. Unity This release sees a lot of effort put into connecting Arkio with Unity, with scenes being able to be round tripped between them.

Up to 2,000 game objects can be brought into Arkio, moved or modelled on top of, and then sent back to Unity. It seems game developers are also interested in using the software for level design.

While this may seem not important for architecture, expanded usage will also drive improvements. To get performance, games developers heavily utilise level of detail (LoD) techniques, so models are displayed with higher fidelity nearer the viewpoint, and lower fidelity further away.

While Arkio currently doesn’t support LoD optimisation, it will be coming at some point. For architects this means the possibility of loading bigger models and having faster VR.

There are also a range of smaller individual features, like the addition of sticky notes, the incorporation of more Revit data and the ability to sketch in 3D.

Conclusion This has been a massive update for the collaborative VR software. It’s clear to see that now the groundwork has been done on the base system, the development teams are fleshing out and refining more advanced capabilities, across a wide range of functionality. For me, the most important new feature is the inclusion of a component library, which points towards taking the product beyond SketchUp levels of ‘‘ The addition of meta-style avatars and hands might architectural modelling. Massing is great but I had always sound like a waste of polygons, but it brings some hoped for more, and sense of personification to the collaborative session now it’s here. and helps anchor the user in the VR environment ’’ Arkio also looks set to become the gateway tool to repurpose architectural models for the metaverse. The team has obviously been working very closely with Meta and I’m sure it’s not lost on the Meta team that this is a great bridge to get the industry into the metaverse - should we wish to cross it. While I am not sure about 99% of the hype around the metaverse, I can buy into the concept of there being a virtual space where architects can collate and repurpose their historic 3D projects and allow customers, students or fans to experience their built and unbuilt work in VR. ■ www.arkio.is