Project RE_ is a large-scale architecture project that results with the building of several affordable homes in East Liberty—a low-income, mid-gentrification neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
RE_CON
a VR study of architectural projects in Pittsburgh
Challenge: Help architects visualize how designs will look in real life.
Solution: Use Virtual Reality to model architectural possibilities in a 2-block radius.
Skills Contributed
- 3D Interaction Design
- Unity Integration
- Photogrammetry
- 3D LIDAR Scanning
- VR Prototyping
- Project Management
Team
- Anna Gusman
- Monica Huang
- Soonho Kwon
Timeline
- Fall 2017
- (2 Months)
Context Visualizer—
Contextual understanding is essential for an architect. The architect must be able to visualize how their designs will fit into the space, how they will be hit by the sun, etc. The context visualizer tool was developed to help the architects.
Why VR—
We then chose Virtual Reality as the method to portray this context because of its capacity to portray spatial relationships as well as produce a level of immersion that allows one to think about the space as a real space.
Prototyping—
For our initial site capture, we used photogrammetry techniques to create a rough model of the street surrounding our lot.
Our first pass to visualize the space was a short video using the photogrammetric model to anchor the model. This, in addition to Google Maps, City of Pittsburgh LIDAR data, and on-site photography, helped us develop a composite of the site and surrounding homes.
Shifting to Unity and Modelling—
Ultimately, the limitations of Photogrammetry and the dense geometries were too expensive for the computer to process large scenes. Also, the trees and other complex trees would be distracting and terrible in VR. Therefore, we shifted to creating simple models of all the different elements in a two-block radius, and handmaking the environment in Unity itself. I personally did not do any of the modelling—that was done by the talented Anna, Monica, and Soonho My task was to take their assets (as well as assets I scoured from the Unity Asset Store) and aggregate them into a singular, cohesive environment. This included the implementation of VR toolkits, writing some scripts in C#, and live post processing.
What I learned—
The main point of this visualizer was to create an environment that would accurately emulate the feeling of the real-world place. This required many qualitative decisions such as wind, flickers in the lights, time of day, etc. I learned how to create a cohesive environment that would portray a lifestyle.In terms of hard skills, I was able to learn how to use Unity 3D at a far greater capacity. Because I was the only one in my group with any functional Unity experience, I learned how to use the platform quickly, while concurrently teaching my peers how to use it. I also learned how to prototype in VR much more quickly, as well as understand certain limitations of the platform. VR should be viewed in 60fps, which can be a steep performance unless one understands the optimization methods.
