Spacemaker vr

[shauncarollo]

Has anybody seen/tried this?

 

http://digitalphysical.com/spacemaker/

[robertkemp]

Hi Shaun,

I wish you lived in LA so I could give you a demo. So far we have given demos to a little more than 100 people. Almost everyone is in LA, architects, real estate agents, tv/movies, interactive media and a few others. Feedback has been very positive and we are looking for our users to shape the product. Do you have any specific features you would like to see in Spacemaker? We would love to hear them.

[beestee]

What are your plans if the Kickstarter does not succeed? Will we see the product come to fruition?

 

 

Are there plans for demos at any upcoming trade shows/conferences? Are you at Autodesk University?

[robertkemp]

Hi Ben, Thanks for the post. Spacemaker works right now. The Kickstarter is to enable further refinements to make the product better and more customizable. If the Kickstarter does not go succeed I still plan on releasing the product next year. I think I would likely drop all the premium content and focus on the software itself. The pricepoint will likely change as well. So far the support has been overwhelmingly positive but I'm hoping to get more feedback from the community in the next week to plan for the best course of action moving forward.

 

Are there any specific features you would like to see? After looking at the Kickstarter page do you have any unanswered questions?

 

I plan to do some tradeshows and conferences next year and I have a bunch of invitations. I would be at Autodesk U right now but my schedule with my day job does not allow for it:-(

 

Are there any specific features you would like to see?

[John Dollus]

I don't see what this offers above using a Rift with any of the other realtime engines available. From the overview, I just don't readily see the advantage over existing solutions.

[robertkemp]

Thanks for the honest feedback. I've heard this a few times now and I think I need to do a much better job in the future talking about the differentiating features. Are you guys already using Unreal or Unity with the Oculus? If you are, what is your impression of the current system?

 

Spacemaker could have been built using any realtime rendering engine (Unity, Unreal, Vizard, etc.). The fact that we are using Vizard does not differentiate it. The features that are included in Spacemaker are the differentiator. For example these features:

* Works will lots of different file types

* Comes with a robust plugin for 3ds Max that shows a realtime lighting and materials viewer at export

* Monoview on the second screen so everyone in the room can see what the viewer sees

* Supports many different HMDs beyond the Oculus

* Works with many different input devices that can be mapped to customizable keyboard keys (defined by user)

* Brandable presentation display

* Ability to take real-time videos and snapshots (images) while a viewer is walking around so that the designer can take notes for edits

 

Yes you can use other real-time rendering engines to visualize architecture but Spacemaker comes with lots of other tools for designers. We are also working on many more features to make the experience even better. For example, the ability to move furniture real-time in the model, swap materials in real-time, change the dimensions and scale of objects, walls, etc in real-time. None of these features exist in Unity or Unreal and you need to be a serious developer to create them on your own.

 

Spacemaker was designed to be simple and easy for a non-developer to experience architecture. I'm not in it for the money, I want to build a tool that helps everyone create better designs. I worked in the field of arch and interactive media design for over 20 years and I've been looking for a tool like this for a long time. Thats why we are building it.

 

I've heard the same comment John made on Arch Daily as well. Does it really seem like Spacemaker is exactly the same as using Unity or Unreal? We want to evolve the features to help designers so I completely welcome suggestions and feedback on what we can do to make Spacemaker better. Thanks in advance.

[robertkemp]

I met with a Kickstarter backer last night (for the first time) and demoed Spacemaker. Here is what he said,

 

"I just had a chance to try out Spacemaker VR. The workflow of importing a model into Spacemaker is orders of magnitude easier than the same task in Unity. Being able to take existing models that architects have readily available and in a few seconds be able to move through a virtual space using an HMD is huge."

 

I also created a video to show how easy it is to get your models into Spacemaker VR:

http://youtu.be/2MluG9NobXM

[Scott Schroeder]

Having used the Rift, I'd never make it a public solution until they come out with the 1080 model which supposedly solves many of the motion sickness issues. Right now, too many people get sick using it. I lasted maybe 5 minutes before feeling woozy. The person at the University doing some dev on it (where I tested it) said he tried it for about 20 minutes before physically throwing up. Even the CEO at Oculus gets sick using his own product.

 

You want the end viewer to drop their jaw in amazement, not lose their lunch.

 

VR just is such a niche spot in architecture. You can't use this for bids, SD or even DD phase unless it is that super rare project that happens every few years. Things just change way too quickly for having to export/import into a 3rd party app. You can't use this for presentations unless you bring 50 Rift's with you or you let one person go at a time. If you let one person use the Rift and everyone else can see the monoview screen, why even use the Rift then? Just save me some money as the buyer, not sell me the Rift, and I'll just show it on screen.

 

I've developed on Vizard before and it's terrible to develop on compared to just about every other engine out there (UDK, Unity, CryEngine). The University where I cut my teeth on Vizard actually dropped it in favor of Unity, and they have it working in their CAVE environment. You can ABSOLUTELY change materials in Unity or UDK. UDK it's super easy with Kisment and unity it's a simple few lines of code that already exist on the Unity forums. How else do you think you can turn lights on and off in games and see the light bulb get brighter, magic? Ditto for moving objects and everything else. I'm sorry but saying you can't do those things easily in UDK or unity is just plain outright false information.

 

These guys have an ingenious solution, but still I can't see it being used in mainstream. http://www.owlized.com/

 

You have a good looking product, but it's honestly like everything else I've seen with other engines.

Edited December 7, 2013 by VelvetElvis

[robertkemp]

Thanks so much for your comment. I wonder if it would be possible to chat with you in more detail? miles [at] digitalphysical (dot) com? I would really appreciate hearing more about your experience with Vizard.

 

The Oculus 1080 model has already been built it but has just not been released to the public. The one I have seen is wireless. There are a bunch of videos online showing it as well. I've demoed Spacemaker and the rift with 200+ people now. There has been a little motion sickness but it has not really been a problem. It usually happens when people do a lot of lateral movement or move in a way that is not the way that people move in real-space. It's kind of a moot point because all of this will be resolved by early next year.

 

I would love to hear more about your experience with Vizard and the version of Vizard you used. Vizard 5 (http://www.worldviz.com/products/vizard/preview) is coming out in a few weeks and it has a ton of new features. In addition to Vizard I like Unity, to me this project has never been about the rendering engine. Its always been about the features relating to the presentation and when the user is in the experience. You are totally right about your comment on Unity and changing materials. That is not what I meant. Was I was saying is that we are working on building tools in the UI that make it so you can swap materials while you are inside walking around in the 3d experience. Menu and controls, etc. You don't need to go into Unity and do editing there.

 

Love the link you posted. Looks awesome. Spacemaker is not about the rendering engine it is about the presentation and real-time communication experiences. There are lots of ways to get 3d arch models into an experience that can be viewed with the Oculus. Spacemaker is about creating user facing tools that make it faster to make models and easier to present and edit models in real-time. Seriously thanks so much for the comment and I would love to talk with you more if you are open to it!

[dharmaone]

The consumer version of Rift is going to come out pretty soon, within 6 months I'd say. They just scored $70m of venture capital which should help speed things up.

 

I had been looking at similar stuff using Unity, would love to hear reasons why you went with Vizard instead?

 

Your demos looked good. I'm guessing you are baking all the GI niceness on the textures?

[beestee]

The consumer version of Rift is going to come out pretty soon, within 6 months I'd say. They just scored $70m of venture capital which should help speed things up.

 

I had been looking at similar stuff using Unity, would love to hear reasons why you went with Vizard instead?

 

Your demos looked good. I'm guessing you are baking all the GI niceness on the textures?

 

 

It is interesting to see why they secured that $70m. Seems that they have cracked the discomfort issues finally with the latest prototype to be shown at the next CES, which is likely what the consumer version will be based upon.

[robertkemp]

You are totally right about the consumer version of the Rift, big news last week with their Series B. They even mentioned architecture in their funding email as a big target for them next year. This totally coincides with our thinking on Spacemaker. Unity is great but I find the workflows to be unnecessarily complicated. Spacemaker works the best with baked materials and it certainly simplifies the workflow export/import process.

 

The Kickstarter did not go through last week but the product is so far along that we are planning to launch in early 2014 anyway. Still working out the details. If you have any specific requests for features. Please let me know!

[Scott Schroeder]

When I wrote my research on using game engines for architectural tours, I got a massive amount of interest from pretty much anyone tied to this industry. However when it came time for the nuts and bolts of it all that interest dried up. If you are developing a streamlined way to get models in the proper space, that will be a large selling point. Sticking to the more traditional route of getting models into a virtual space is where the disconnect tends to come in the process.

 

The other big key point was getting around the, "What do I do with this when the project is completed?" question. I was able to definitively prove that using virtual tours was much cheaper than building and maintaining model homes. However the question that I couldn't answer was the fact that the developer can resell the model homes and recoup some cost. You can't resell that virtual tour. It's an upfront cost that cannot be sold back. So having a long term plan for what do to with that piece of software and hardware is going to go a long way in selling some clients.

 

We used Vizard 3 and it was just a pain from the start. That was before they included any sort of visual scene editor. You had to place it all in code, then only when you launched the program did you know if it worked or not. For us, that was a huge killer. I don't know if 4 has it, but it looks like 5 will have one. The other big down point was the community support wasn't that of the other engines at the time. People just weren't really developing for Vizard and/or sharing their knowledge.

 

Once we figured things out, we got some pretty decent looking virtual apps out of Vizard 3 by using baked textures from Max. But the process to get it into Vizard 3 was just too painful compared to the more visual editing styles of other engines at the time. We also found that at a certain point, large models with baked textures wasn't the best way to go. You just ended up having to load too many unique objects and unique textures for it to be efficient in real time. Using a modular workflow was the way to solve that issue for large scale projects like a city downtown area.

Edited December 17, 2013 by VelvetElvis