At IrisVR and every quarter, we stop everything to work on hack projects for a couple of days. In Q1 of this year, I decided to develop an Augmented Reality app that could stream objects and changes made to their geometry in real time. ARCore, Google’s augmented reality SDK for Android, is now available for developers and Unity has great support for it. I thought it would be fun to test it by creating an Augmented Reality environment that uses Firebase as the backend to send information back and forth between the computer, where the geometry is being created in Grasshopper, and the phone (a Pixel 1), where said geometry gets populated and rendered. Check it out below!
Last December I spoke at the Center for Architecture in NYC with the CORE studio team. Description and video below (my section begins on minute 28).
Technology drives innovation, experimentation, and efficiency in the AEC industry, but implementing technology into practice and everyday use requires a larger strategy. Often, the needs of projects and practice exceed the capability of commercially available software packages, requiring us to build our own tools. The CORE studio is a computation and research group within Thornton Tomasetti that experiments with and evaluates technologies for use across the diverse practice areas of the entire firm.
In September I spoke at the AEC Tech Symposium. With Mostapha Roudsari, we discussed how some of the most recent web-based development projects at CORE studio – including VRX – are enabled by open-source initiatives and how these platforms are being used for better collaboration inside and outside Thornton Tomasetti.
This past year at Thornton Tomasetti’s CORE studio, I have been designing and developing VRX – a project to view Building Information Models in Virtual Reality. This web application allows the model creator to guide others in a shared virtual environment using the Google Cardboard. I just published a blog post about it, and you can read more about it here.