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My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-fir
by jondiggsit 2mo ago
My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-first approach. Schematic design starts in 3D using Rhino3D or Revit. We use visualization plugins, like Enscape, to render the models and stream to a Quest 3 headset.
So when clients come in, and feels adventurous, we'll setup the headset, set the display height to their actual, and let them walk around their beautiful new home.
The response has been powerful. My clients are able to truly understand the scale, the proportion of rooms, ceiling heights, and the smallest details.
We're able to make real-time changes to the model (within reason) and provide instant design feedback.
I've been using this technology for years and I'm surprised it's not being adopted faster - good for us right now though!
- seemaze 2mo agoDo you find the value of VR/AR to be in the communication of design intent to clients unfamiliar with traditional 2D representations, or do your designers leverage VR/AR during the design development process as well?
- jondiggsit 2mo agoAbsolutely both. Internally, we'll model something, move an element, etc., and we're able to evaluate the idea until it feels right. For clients, I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation does nothing for them. They will nod, make comments, and play along, but until you sketch a person into the drawing, they don't even understand that the front door is ten feet tall.
- jasonfarnon 2mo ago"I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation" I think 2D prints aren't the baseline, and since at least the late 2000s even run of the mill architecture firms have been using 3d studio-type renderings with clients. Maybe I don't understand how the visionpro works. Your clients arent actually physically moving their body, right? What's the advantage of looking around the space in a visionpro vs large monitor?
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoI’ve been through this (but with different software than the author used). The level of immersion, the sense of being there, is dramatically better with the Vision Pro. It was the biggest unlock when it came to choosing a staircase design. Hard to picture ahead of time and expensive to change later.
- DonHopkins 2mo agoI worked with DUS Architects in Amsterdam on a staircase designer / visualizer for their enormous fused deposition modelling (FDM) 3D house printers, using Rhino + Grasshopper + Unity3D. "Complexity is free when you are drawing with a nozzle." One thing about their use of plant-based bioplastic is that if you didn't like your staircase or house after printing it, you could shred it, melt it back down, redesign it, and print out a different one again. >On a plot in Amsterdam-Noord, DUS Architects turned a six-metre FDM printer called the KamerMaker into a research laboratory disguised as a house — extruding honeycomb rooms from plant-based bioplastic to ask whether a building can be downloaded, printed on site, and shredded back into feedstock when it is done. https://houseofdus.com/ https://houseofdus.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180509103603/http://3dprintcanalhouse.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180509103603/http://3dprintcan... https://www.studiomatrx.org/guides/3d-print-canal-house https://www.studiomatrx.org/guides/3d-print-canal-house >The KamerMaker: a desktop printer, grown enormous >The instrument at the centre of the project is a machine called the KamerMaker — Dutch for "room maker" — installed on the site from September 2012. Conceptually it is disarmingly simple: it is a fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer, the same layer-by-layer, melt-and-extrude technology found in a hobbyist desktop machine, scaled up until it stands roughly six metres tall inside a movable, container-sized pavilion. It was developed by DUS in dialogue with the desktop-printing world — the Ultimaker community was part of that lineage — and it can print single elements up to about 2.2 × 2.2 × 3.5 metres. Much earlier (1997-2000) I worked on The Sims architectural editing tools for walls, floors, windows, doors, swimming pools, ladders, diving boards, object placement, etc, including the staircase placement tool, which was extra tricky because it spanned two stories, punched holes in the floor, and reserved two contiguous floor landing tiles upstairs and downstairs. Orchestrating the undo/redo edit records in the right order was diabolical. ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs The Anti-Heisenberg Teleporter added by House Party was not actually classified as a staircase although it spanned two floors and had landing tiles. But it worked since the staircase tool (and other specialized tools like windows, doors, pool ladders and diving boards, etc) were actually just special modes of the generic universal object placement tool. Stairs Aesthetics In Every Sims - Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43IwecyTHYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43IwecyTHYU The modular clown themed roller coaster construction kit in Makin' Magic was amazing! The Sims 1 Was Made in 2000...and it's still amazing: https://youtu.be/x00rH9eIJgo?t=216 https://youtu.be/x00rH9eIJgo?t=216 LGR - The Sims 1 & 2 Legacy Collection Review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUDt4BoMg-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUDt4BoMg-s
- seemaze 2mo agoAre there any productive tools or workflows you employ for modeling directly in VR? Or is it more useful for review and evaluation of models developed on traditional workstations? I'm AEC adjacent and am trying to talk myself into picking up a pair strictly for personal architectural projects..
- jondiggsit 2mo agoWe really only use it for architectural intent. There is a dream that is BIM on residential projects, but unless the project has an extreme level of technical constrains, it's often cost prohibitive to model EVERYTHING. I'm really hoping that AI assisted design tools will bridge the gap. Imagine uploading architectural and structural drawings and AI correctly modeling HVAC duct size, mechanical room requirements for pumps, boilers, etc., modeling electrical chases, vent pipes, exhaust ducts, ERVs, etc., in a local code compliant manner. I know it's coming and I can't freaking wait. We have on occasion used our Matterport 3 lidar scanner to model existing structural conditions to help us figure out a problem. Re Matterport 3 - we use it as a communication tool for remote work sessions with engineers, architects, clients, etc. Saves everyone a trip to the site. Helps us document progress, preserve historical details, uncover discrepancies between field and plan, etc.
- jmtulloss 2mo agoI am working on this at bear.build. It's early, but I would love to get your feedback if you have some time. justin@bear.build
- jondiggsit 2mo agoWe tried using this software - https://www.prevu3d.com/digital-twin-use-cases/design-engineering/ https://www.prevu3d.com/digital-twin-use-cases/design-engine... It looks cool, but it wasn't applicable for our day-to-day.
- asadotzler 2mo agoDo you believe Apple will continue to spend billions on a device that caters to niche enterprise use cases and is today selling in single digit thousands per month, if that? If so, qhat other Apple products out there suggest that enterprise is something Apple cares about enough to maintain a distinct product line? This isn't Mac Pro where 95% of the R&D and production costs are shared with half a dozen other major Mac SKUs. This isn't MacOS. It isn't iOS. It isnt even iPad OS which it was initially based on. Excepting the SoC, the hardware is entirely bespoke. It doesn't seem realistic to me that they'd continue it without a real consumer audience that the last 2.5 years proved does not exist. Hell, even the lowly Quest, that cost Meta over $100B so far, sold nearly 30M units and Meta's clearly bailing on that as it pivots to non-enclosed facial computers like glasses. The whole category is a failure outside of a few enterprise cases.
- koolala 2mo agoThe comment your replying to used Quest 3. No need for Apple. Steam Frame will probably have a color camera module too and be even more flexible as a real computer.
- greggsy 2mo agoMacBook Neo is a clear business win. Cheap, available, consistent, works with standard Jamf MDM, and trivial warranty repairs/replacemnts. Most small to medium enterprises run off SaaS. The most common local tool is Office suite, which now has feature parity with the Windows version.
- WheatMillington 2mo agoOK, go off.
- lysace 2mo agoWait, you actually have an empty building/area the size of a typical custom design home? Aren't those typically rather huge? Do you partition the previews?
- hackernudes 2mo agoWhy would you assume they physically walk around the entire space instead of teleporting/moving in VR?
- lysace 2mo ago> Do you partition the previews?
- justinator 2mo agoIt's the Hamptons, these houses are for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. I'd make them wear a giant visor over their face rather than have to talk to them directly too. They're also some of the most insufferable people you'll ever meet.
- jondiggsit 2mo agoThe Quest has joysticks to control your position. We managed to get one of our 70 year old clients to figure it out.
- forsalebypwner 2mo agoOkay I have to ask - do the joysticks move you forward like they typically would for a character in a video game? Or do you use teleport controls? Because the former would absolutely make me (and I think most people?) motion sick
- jondiggsit 2mo agoIt's as good as any VR FPS game.
- SirHackalot 2mo agoThis comment almost made me quit my job and pursue my original passion in architecture. So the job was, all along, as fun as I imagined it… And the full-stack knowledge to make it happen is still rare? I am currently designing my house in Blender and was planning to import it into Unreal Engine to make it navigable. HN has a way of serving me the content I’m looking for at the right time…
- jondiggsit 2mo agoI love hearing statements like this. I want to learn how to import into Unreal Engine... also throw a rocket launcher in there with some destruction physics. I will caution tho, converting the Rhino models back into CAD for construction drawings, etc. is time consuming. One of my architects is skilled in Revit, but we haven't explored the real time rendering / 3d visualization abilities enough with it.
- NuclearPM 2mo agoStart with a parametric program like solid works
- wlesieutre 2mo agoRevit is parametric, but something like Rhino (going off reputation, never used it myself) gives you more free-form modeling control. It’s like starting with a pencil sketch instead of going straight to SolidWorks, once you start building that more nailed down drawing with its explicit flow of sketches and operations in relationship to each other, it becomes much harder to make large structural changes. https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-71F2C8EE-2A90-4076-A6C7-702082566DDF https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-71F2C...
- adfm 2mo agoRhino + Grasshopper is the gold standard for all the curvy geometry in anything resembling Zaha Hadid’s work. It is also parametric. There’s even a plug-in to use it inside Revit. Solidworks is great for designing the chassis, but the body was probably sketched in Rhino or Maya.
- papercruncher 2mo agoI did this circa 2021 (with SketchUp, Enscape, Quest 2) during our house remodel. It was very successful in reducing the number of walls my wife wanted to move around after they had been finished
- NuclearPM 2mo agoReducing?
- masklinn 2mo agoVirtual visit, get feel for house layout, get walls moved on the plans before building, less walls to be moved after building.
- yunusabd 2mo agoI think parent comment was surprised that there was _any_ moving of walls after the fact, which "reducing" implies..
- Mawr 2mo agoNever get married, man...
- tonyedgecombe 2mo agoThere is a continual stream of TV programs about housing which tell you every problem can be solved by knocking a wall down, building an extension, installing bi-fold doors or a granite worktop. If your partner watches this stuff then you are in trouble.
- ghaff 2mo agoMy house has definitely been opened up over time since I bought it. Not really the upstairs but the ground floor is much more open and lighter. In fact, it's where I mostly do stuff on a laptop in spite of having a full-fledged office upstairs.
- 2mo ago
- ensemblehq 2mo agoWow I’m incredibly impressed that you’ve decided to embrace VR technology. When renovating our house, it was incredibly hard (and still is) to visualize how everything. So far we just got lucky but the basement is going to be a challenge as we’re making structural adjustments. How did you get your team to get onboard with the process? How is the ROI?
- jondiggsit 2mo agoMy team design team are graduate architects, on the younger-ish side - 29 and 40. One worked for Santiago Calatrava - who, if you know, obviously models all his work. So it was second nature to them, I just pushed them to lean into it. Rhino is not without its drawbacks. It is time consuming but it's worth it because, as a sales tool, it wins every time. I'll have first time meetings with perspective clients where we'll wireframe a design on their survey (if we know some particulars of the program). Blows people away. The ROI - the salaries were a negative on the books for two years, but now we're choosing our projects, ones that any AD100 firm would kill for.
- artisinal 2mo agoI really hope that one day I am so incredibly rich that I can hire a team like yours. It would be amazing to have a professional firm design a house for you. I’m guessing you have to be in the 1% for that.
- simonjgreen 2mo agoThis comment got me curious, as it felt attainable/more commonplace to me. I did some searching, and according to gov.uk stats 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes. That is actually surprisingly high!
- artisinal 2mo agoImpressive. Where I live you get a flat assigned and you put your old furniture in. Maybe you paint the walls, but they have to be white when you move out. If you are doing well for yourself you buy a house from a project. It will be 150 identical homes next to each other. If you pay extra you get to decide the color of the kitchen and what tiles you want in the pre-designed bathroom. Designing your own home is some Jeff Bezos stuff.
- mlrtime 2mo agoIt's quite common in the USA ... but since we have massive sprawl they will build whole neighborhoods at once, give you a choice of 5-10 different model homes and then you can customize on top of that. Sometimes a customization can be a whole floor. If the builder does it correctly you really have to squint to tell which homes are the exact same since they are all slightly different.
- tsimionescu 2mo agoI would bet a lot of those are still not being designed by a team that is working for you specifically. It's also important that if the statistic is 7-10% of homes, that's very different from 7-10% of people living in such homes.
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- bambax 2mo agoThis is wonderful and amazing, but isn't there a risk to over promise? Reality can never be as perfect as a 3D rendering...?
- 542354234235 2mo agoBut reality is never as perfect as the design. It seems to me that being able to "stand" in a rendering and look around is going to put you much closer to reality than looking at blueprints and a front elevation. So i don't think the question is "could VR and the end product be different" it is "is VR closer to the end product than other options" and I think the answer is likely, yes.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- noduerme 2mo agoHeh. Like 10 years ago I was designing retail stores for a company expanding their franchises. Each location had to be a bit different, depending on the quirks of the building they were leasing. I was doing the 3D layouts of the interiors, so I built a webvr app to let them jump through the renderings (not a walk-around; it mapped out a bunch of different fully raytraced stereoscopic skyboxes from different positions that you could navigate between). We used to send out an oculus rift to the new franchisees while they were in the build phase so they could check out the renderings and request changes as we were finalizing it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo agoFor those that don’t know, the Hamptons are full of very nice places. The uber-rich have second homes, there, that are bigger than Gold Coast first homes. This company probably makes a lot of money, but they also have serious competition, so they need things like the 3D walkthroughs. Summer traffic in the Hamptons is a nightmare, though. Many uber-rich have helipads.
- roomgenie 2mo ago[flagged]
- jondiggsit 2mo agoYou are 100% correct. My company is fortunate enough to have the working capital and time to explore ideas, which is honestly, one of the most fulfilling parts of my business. And the Hamptons competition is very serious. It's insane really. Construction in the Hamptons is the Olympics of high-end building. There are atleast a dozen excellent, amazing builders and over 250 active companies in total. My company sits near the top of that list and the only one, to my knowledge, actively leveraging technology to our advantage. No private heli-pads, they banned it long ago. There's a little known heli-pad on Meadow Lane in Southampton. So from your SoHo office to your beachfront house is under an hour. There's also Blade service to EH. One of my clients often arrives by seaplane to check on the progress of his Peconic Bay waterfront project. It's pretty cool.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo agoAh. Glad to hear they banned them. I guess even the snobs got tired of having their teeth rattling out of their heads. Glad to hear you guys are doing so well.
- jamesbuiltreal 2mo agoHey mate, I'm a builder in Sydney, Australia and I'm currently trying to implement something very similar in my business. I'd love to connect and have a chat about the ins and outs if you'd be open to it? If you could reach out that would be awesome. My email is in my bio. Or reply to this comment if you need another form of contact.
- sublimefire 2mo agoNot vr/ar but 3d visualisations and walkthroughs were a thing like 20 years ago. I did try to leverage it with the clients but what happened was that once people could see everything they had more opinions about how to change it. It helped me to get clients though. Sometimes it would go on for quite a ”few” iterations. I think it is more scalable not to do it, i.e. not to be on the cutting edge, unless the customer pays premium for it. I am pretty sure vr/ar has the same challenges where people are like “oh I thought the ceiling was higher, can we increase it by 2 inches and move the stair case a bit?” then you do it and something is wrong again.
- mikeaskew4 2mo agoI'd see that as evidence that the visualization is doing its job. It's much cheaper to discover "I wish the ceiling were 2" higher" before anyone starts building than after. The challenge is reducing the cost of each iteration. That's where newer tooling starts to matter.
- iandanforth 2mo agoCan you please do a separate post about your job? The technology sounds amazing and I'd love to know how AI is now interacting with this stack. Also, which firm? Might need a design soon!