Ryan Neil

The Scenario

The design team starts with a detailed, 3D LiDAR scan of an existing neighborhood. The scan is a combination of drone and first-person shots taken by a subcontractor and supplemented by the local community with scans, photos, and video taken with mobile phones. The resulting model will be used as a base for design efforts.

Back at the office, the team uses virtual reality to walk through the existing neighborhood. Their objective is to document key locations and review community feedback. This is a good opportunity to start sketching rough ideas over the existing model during initial conversations to capture early thoughts. After collecting internal and external feedback and marking up the model, the team re-engages the community to share their thoughts and summarize early feedback on existing conditions.

The design process begins with rough modeling of early sketched ideas. As the team continues to refine ideas, they frequently jump into VR to review and discuss. The 3D scan of the existing neighborhood is gradually appended with new designs for streetscapes, sidewalks, and building typologies. In addition to visual feedback, the VR environment is used to simulate noise at various times of day given different streetscape variations and predicted traffic levels.

Another community engagement workshop ensues with designs at around 30% completion. Community members are encouraged to explore the designs and provide feedback during an in-person session as well as online using a link to a publicly accessible model. Local residents are able to walk through the designs in VR and experience the changes from different vantage points — including from their home or business and other areas they frequent. During the engagement sessions, the design team organizes an on-site walkthrough using augmented reality to overlay the new concept designs over the existing streetscape in real time. The resulting feedback is documented and used to further the designs to around 70%.

The Breakdown

There are a few key areas where spatial computing can contribute to the design process:

1. The design team and their stakeholders are able to view the existing area and mark it up in VR from anywhere. This helps to create a record of feedback on key locations and keep the image of what they’re improving fresh in mind.
2. Designers can immediately start overlaying design ideas on the 3D model of the existing site and review them at 1:1 scale in VR. This helps to ensure the team is always considering the site and their proposed improvements at human scale.
3. The community has access to the 3D model of the existing site and proposed design improvements throughout the process during in-person workshops and online via a public website. This helps to keep the community engaged and facilitates greater understanding for residents that find it difficult to comprehend static renderings.

Challenges

The technology available today — including standalone VR headsets like the Quest — is certainly capable of achieving all of the above. However, the bar to entry is still too high for most community members and some professionals. And the only AR devices that would suffice for this use case at present are mobile phones, which are not ideal for walking around to view new designs in the context of the existing site with concerns around safety.

The biggest hurdles for professionals are around integration and UX — how to get a 3D scan of an existing site into a 3D modeling program, link it to a VR environment, annotate the model, replace areas of the existing model with new designs, and simulate real-world conditions.

All of these steps are possible with existing tools. However, it requires too much effort to combine into a coherent workflow for a team that is working on multiple projects concurrently.

In person workshops with the community are a great opportunity to deploy designs in VR and walk through them with local residents, but as VR is inherently a single-player experience it can be a slow process that is not ideal for group settings. Furthermore, helping a group of people learn how to use VR for the first time is difficult and time-consuming.