Virtual Reality and the Construction Industry

We had a great presentation and demo on August 12th at my "Improving Project Delivery" session. 
Thanks to Laura at Kasian for hosting the event and to Chris at Underhill Geomatics for sponsoring the event's food.

One of the presenters was Shane Scranton, the co-founder and CEO of IrisVR came in to talk about Virtual Reality and the Construction Industry. He also brought along his equipment so people could try Virtual Reality out for themselves... it was a hit! I think everybody in the room tried it out at least once.

"At IrisVR, we are working on an immersive design and presentation tool that sends SketchUp and Revit files directly into a virtual reality environment. Easily view your 3D models in the Oculus Rift and experience your designs true to scale."

I believe this type of technology is going to have great impact on the design and construction industry. I can see great potential for this technology especially when it comes to having to build “mock-up’s” for user groups.

A mock-up is where we have to build an physical example of an area for “user groups” to try out the area, to “experience the space”. This is typically first done by simply printing out to full size scale the floor plan, then we do a cardboard mock-up and then the contractor finally builds a replica of the final design. For example we typically do this for medical treatment area’s in a hospital. These mock-up can be very costly and time consuming. VR is far more cost effective, as least for the initial mock-ups.

Imagine sitting your client down in your office, giving him a headset (or a pair of glasses) and letting them explore the space in Virtual Reality! This is happening now, and the technology is improving very fast.

Check out this video as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgxPEBKueiY

Great presentation and Demo, thanks again for coming out to Vancouver Shane.

Sc