Virtual Reality

[Devin Johnston]

Has anyone here heard of these guy's or better yet is anyone using one of their VR setups?

 

http://www.worldviz.com/solutions/architecture.html?gclid=CMy7loeAlZ0CFeRL5Qod4Vck2A

[EddieLeon]

I'm not sure if it's the same one, but M2 Studios in Dallas showed me their VR setup. It was very impressive, although it got me a little nauseous:o

[Devin Johnston]

When I asked them who was using their system they said M2 Studios were really the first ones to use it. I'm pretty sure it's out of our price range though as the full setup costs around $100K, the headgear alone costs about $35K.

[EddieLeon]

Yep. That's the price range they told me it costs. I'm not sure if they are still using it much. Maybe you can contact Michael at M2 and see if he's interested in selling it.

[Devin Johnston]

Na there's no way I can see spending that kind of money on anything in the near future, but I was thinking I could use the software in combination with a pare of DLP projectors to get a stereoscopic image. I could probably put all of that together for less than $10K.

[Tommy L]

I saw two projectors working together to make a stereoscopic screen setup (amongst other interesting things) working very well at Hull University in the UK. They were very keen for independent companies to come in and share their research. If you want to know more, you should contact Neil at 3dcom (http://www.3dcom.co.uk). That was a while ago tho, maybe things have changed.

[Devin Johnston]

I'm beginning to wonder if the up and comming generation of real time render engines like Vray RT will be able to do pretty much the same thing these virtual walk through engines can. From what I've seen it looks like the image quality will be much higher and you'd be able to change things on the fly which you can't do with these VR engines.

[MichaelPotts]

Yes I do have one of these Virtual Reality Setups from World VIz.

 

in my opnion its absolutely incredible and quite frankly years ahead of its time.

 

let me know if you want to know anything about it.

 

Michael Potts

M2 Studio

[Devin Johnston]

Here are some questions if you don't mind:

 

- do you use it for in house development or do you use it to impress clients or both?

-how did you justify spending so much money on it, did one of your clients request it?

-can you tell us something about the work flow, the guy's at World Viz said you can use Mental Ray, Vray, or scan line to bake in the textures and lighting but the didn't really give me a good idea of how long it took to do that.

-are you using the headgear setup or some kind of CAVE system, have you had any problems?

[MichaelPotts]

I have used the set up for both in house development and to impress clients. But it was never really used directly for client’s sales needs. It did prove to be very valuable as a marketing tool, and a promotional tool. It brought us face to face with a number of big developers, builders, and other reputable companies, but as of today I have not sold any Virtual Reality Services to anyone, although I hope to some day. The contracts it did bring me were large 100k+ animation projects that I was not getting before I purchased the system though. I didn’t buy it because any of my clients requested it; I just made the calculated risk that my existing and new customers would be interested in the technology. They were but no one has deemed fit to be the first to step up and pay me for the service.

The work flow took me a few weeks of experimenting to get right. It’s more like video game level design then straight Architectural Vis. But knowing architectural Viz is critical to successfully creating environments.

I use V-ray and texture bake the main space and then add other elements at a later time. Using a main shell environment can allow you to get the feel of the space before you complete every last detail and then decide where you want to put your detail at. Once you get the technique down it takes about 2-4 hours to get a space baked decently, longer for very refined lighting, then a couple of more hours to refine issues and mistakes. A simple environment can be baked and imported in less then an hour a very complex space could take several days. It's important to start out with simple spaces to see how it works and then move up to the more complex. Eventually bitmap and polygon counts will limit you but only once you have reached pretty high limits, also faster the computer speeds and more memory on the video card gives you a very high complexity ceiling. Being efficient with your modeling and using efficient bitmap selection will increase your limit as well.

I have been using the headgear setup for years now. It did have a slight problem after about a years worth of heavy use. But the manufacturer fixed it at no cost. I’m also very, very happy with the staff at World Viz you couldn’t ask for a nicer, more helpful group of people to work with. Truthfully, they are some of the nicest guys I have ever worked with. We occasionally joke that this system is like the Holodeck version 1.1 from Star Trek. There is no question there is room for improvement but it feels like a technology that is 20 years ahead of its time.

[Devin Johnston]

Thanks for all the info it's very helpful, that setup must be amazing.