Significant announcements for AR/VR for the CAD / AEC Industries

Why CAD should care about AR/VR?

VR (Virtual Reality) is all niche headsets and gaming? Or putting bunny ears on selfies… VR basically has a marketing problem. Looks cool but for many in enterprise it seems a niche technology to preview architectural buildings etc. In fact, the use cases are far wider if you get passed those big boxy headsets. AR (Augmented Reality) is essentially bits of VR on top of something see-through. There’s a nice overview video of the Microsoft Hololens from Leila Martine at Microsoft, including some good industrial case studies (towards the end of the video), here. Sublime have some really insightful examples too, such as a Crossrail project using AR for digital twin maintenance.

This week there have been some _really_ very significant announcements from two “gaming” engines, Unity and the Unreal Engine (UE) from Epic. The gaming engines themselves take data about models (which could be CAD/AEC models) together with lighting and material information and put it all together in a “game” which you can explore – or thinking of it another way they make a VR experience. Traditionally these technologies have been focused on gaming and film/media (VFX) industries. Whilst these games can be run with a VR headset, like true games they can be used on a big screen for collaborative views.

Can Virtual Reality (VR) mess with your head?

Is VR bad for you and your health? Back in March I was at the D3DLive 2017 show at Warwick University. There was a track on VR, AR and professional visualisation plus the chance to try out several pieces of VR/AR/visualisation kit both on the show floor and during a fascinating tour of the WMG (Warwick Manufacturing Group) labs.

The true VR applications seem to me very much limited to the preview experience for something remote or that doesn’t exist e.g. previewing a building or car interior options or for training e.g. firefighters/army etc. The preview experiences are something I imagine would be in general short experiences but training scenarios I imagine could last for a protracted duration.