swnip01s Imagine using virtual realty to shape, nd sll, spaces - Puget Sound Business Journal From the Puget Sound Business Journal :http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/print-edition/2015/10/30/imagine-using- vr-to-shape-and-sell-spaces. Commercial Real Estate Imagine using virtual reality to shape, and sell, spaces SUBSCRIBER CONTENT: Oct 30, 2015, 3:00am POT Casey Mahon, Contributing Columnist Have you ever wished you could redesign your building just by pushing walls around with your hands? Architects and designers share that urge. Fortunately for us — and possibly for your business — the day will arrive soon when we can all enter virtual reality (VR) and craft shapes and spaces using our hands, akin to a sculptor at work. At a recent talk in San Diego titled “Immersive Environments and Gestural Modeling,” I went into the technical detail of how new VR tools — often used with goggles or headsets that display a 3-D alternate world — can be combined with freeform hand movements that are captured with wearable sensors or something as simple as an iPad screen. Working with these tools is a surprisingly intuitive experience of seeing and creating spaces and shapes. Imagine showing your client the actual space they want to lease, and then putting on headsets and showing them all the options they have for renovating and changing the office's interiors: Move this wall over here. Add a glass partition here. Draw the curving coffee bar over here. The tenant fitout can be seen and understood on the spot — and the design consultant can save the model everyone just created and inhabited (virtually, of course) and use it to make the floor plans and even computerized CNC milling of the curvy coffee bar by a favored fabricator. Or you can output a model using your 3-D printer to show to the prospective lessee. In fact, the technology is already there, and it is poised to revolutionize how 3-D design happens. It's all thanks to the merging of modeling with virtual reality, as well as tools that translate hand movements into data for the models. With the VR immersive environments, on the one hand, and gestural modeling tools on the other, soon the door will open to wide-scale use of hipshwww biourrals.comiseateprint- eon 7015/10%0"magine-wsing-w-to-shape-and.sel-spaceshamls=pcnt rrswnip01s Imagine using virtual realty to shape, nd sll, spaces - Puget Sound Business Journal this emerging technology. Tt sounds like a lot of fun, and we architects really think it is. But it’s also essential for design- centric businesses, It means a cost for us, too; it’s a major change in how our design practice works, and adoption means real investment in pricey new interfaces and new, custom workflows. It's not clear exactly how all this will shake out, frankly. But one thing is for certain: we'll remove the keyboard and mouse from the process. It's futuristic, to be sure, but it also brings us back to an older idea about designing buildings and interiors. We actually get to use our hands in the act of making — digitally, of course. Casey Mahon is a designer and the director of the Design Technology Group at CarrierJohnson + CULTURE, a California-based architecture, design and strategic branding practice. hipshwww biourrals.comiseateprint- eon 7015/10%0"magine-wsing-w-to-shape-and.sel-spaceshamls=pcnt