A.I.D - Virtual Reality System for Architects

PROJECT BACKGROUND:

‘A.I.D’ (Architectural Immersive Design) is a virtual reality system that allows architects to immerse themselves in a virtual environment affected by natural disaster. This was a university project where I was the team lead of fellow user experience designers, games animators and computer programmers. The goal for this project was to use technology to help in the re-build an affected landscape, community or city. The project achieved a finalist position at a university wide competition called ‘Bright Ideas’.

Design Challenges:

On-boarding for New Users

Given the complex nature of the virtual reality system created, it was important to create an easy to understand on-boarding experiences for new users. It was decided to use panels that would display important information for the user to learn and test. This made it easy for the user to use their ray cast and point at a particular panel, which would open and display detailed information about a particular section.

Virtual Reality Navigation

One of the challenges for this project was providing a suitable navigation tool for architects to use whilst immersed in the VR system. The navigational tool needed to provide the user with the ability to complete many different tasks. These included moving from different areas of the building, selecting different materials to build with, adding interior accessories such as chairs and tables and also saving and exporting the building plans. Below is a selection of images to highlight the progress from low to high fidelity .

Future Work: Augmented Reality

Once the VR Prototype was completed, the team began developing an app that would display the buildings created in the VR system in augmented reality. This was created to provide an easy to understand step by step guide to building the designs. See below the a video of the app prototype.