Over the last year we’ve been col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Vancouver offices of Perkins + Will, and just fin­ished a project video on it (thanks to the great stu­dents team from IAT334: Linda Nguyen, Danny Blackstock, Jason Chen, and Justin Poon!).

One guid­ing ques­tion for the project was how to best use immer­sive Virtual Reality and embod­ied loco­mo­tion inter­faces to to design more  cost- and space-effi­cient solu­tions for effec­tive pre­sen­ta­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion of archi­tec­tur­al designs and ideas.  Our over­all goal is to iter­a­tive­ly design and eval­u­ate a novel embod­ied VR system that enables users to quick­ly, intu­itive­ly, and pre­cise­ly posi­tion their vir­tu­al view­point in 3D space and nav­i­gate through the space while free­ing up both hands for inter­ac­tion with the envi­ron­ment and more nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion using ges­tures (e.g., with stake­hold­ers and col­leagues during a design review ses­sion). The video describes our work so far (pub­li­ca­tions will follow soon hope­ful­ly… more info at the project page). Enjoy!