Collaborative VR company The Wild buys IrisVR’s Prospect

Prospect, the first virtual reality program for architects and engineers that allows users upload design files from Rhino, Revit, and more and explore them digitally and at human-scale, has a new home. Today, February 25, The Wild, a company focused on collaborative AR and VR for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, announced that it had acquired. Prospect from parent company IrisVR.Prospect’s

Installation view of the Virtual Views Judd tour
MoMA brings its exhibitions online through the Virtual Views series

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) might still be closed to the public, but thanks to its Virtual Views series of digital tours, “visitors” can check out what’s going on at the museum every Thursday night. By harnessing a combination of video, high-resolution images of every piece and didactics, a multitude of audio guides for

A large black architectural model on a colorful carpet
Space Popular showcases 500 years of architectural media at RIBA with VR

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is staging its first virtual reality exhibition, Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media, created by Space Popular and curated by Shumi Bose. How architectural styles change and combine, and are propelled by media—etchings, magazines, Pinterest—is at the center of Space Popular‘s dizzying installation, and the changes in the

A timber interior with a spiral staircase and large plate glass windows.
Architects apply the latest in fabrication, design, and visualization to age-old timber

Every so often, the field of architecture is presented with what is hailed as the next “miracle building material.” Concrete enabled the expansion of the Roman Empire, steel densified cities to previously unthinkable heights, and plastic reconstituted the architectural interior and the building economy along with it. But it would be reasonable to question why

A tall building with a sweepiing facade made of interlocking white Ts, designed by Morphosis. The building continues at a lower height as a undulating gray roof with some irregular fenestration.
Morphosis’s Kerenza Harris talks tech and integration

Kerenza Harris is the director of design technology at Morphosis, where she works across the firm to integrate advanced computational techniques and high-tech simulations throughout the design process. Ahead of her presentation on system-based design processes and extended reality at TECH+ in Los Angeles next week, AN caught up with Harris to get her takes

Image of iPad with architectural visualization on it
Unity creates new open source tool just for architects with Reflect

Video game software suites like Unreal Engine and Unity have made their way into the architectural arsenal with AEC firms like Skanska, Foster + Partners, and Zaha Hadid Architects using them to visualize and test new buildings. However, these tools weren’t necessarily built with AEC professionals in mind and while they often result in nice-looking

A laptop with a window open showing furniture
Morpholio brings Board software to desktop with expanded pro-features and VR

Morpholio, the architect-turned-developer-run company known for its Trace app that blends augmented reality, digital hand drafting, and other architectural tools on portable devices, has brought its interior design program, Board, to desktops for the first time.  Coming on the heels of the new Mac Catalina operating system update, the desktop version of Board leverages the

A virtual hand and paintbrush over facades painted with a watercolor effect, in a Michael Graves-designed landscape.
You can paint unbuilt Michael Graves projects in VR

The late Michael Graves has seen his previously unbuilt work finally realized in a virtual reality environment thanks to Imagined Landscapes. The interactive sightseeing experience was created by Kilograph, a Los Angeles creative studio that has worked with firms like Gensler and Zaha Hadid Architects. Based on Graves’s painted plans for the unbuilt Canary Islands

A 3D person in a colorful suit with a large disk for a head stands on top of a high rise.
Apple and New Museum team up for choreographed urban AR art tours

New York’s New Museum, which has already launched a fair share of tech-forward initiatives like net-art preservation and theorization platform Rhizome and NEW INC, has teamed up with Apple over the past year-and-a-half to create a new augmented reality (AR) program called [AR]T. New Museum director Lisa Phillips and artistic director Massimiliano Gioni selected artists

A top-down view of a construction scene
How can new technologies make construction safer?

Construction remains one of the most dangerous careers in the United States. To stop accidents before they happen, construction companies are turning to emerging technologies to improve workplace safety—from virtual reality, drone photography, IoT-connected tools, and machine learning. That said, some solutions come with the looming specter of workplace surveillance in the name of safety,

Architect creates app to change how exhibitions are designed

For all the advances in technology over the past decade, the experience of curating and viewing museum shows has remained relatively unchanged. Even though digital archive systems exist and have certainly helped bring old institutions into the present, they have relatively little influence over the ways museum shows are designed and shared. The normal practice

Photo of two people standing under a canopy that is billowing up over them
Designer and engineer Nassia Inglessis creates responsive canopy

Today, most people live in cities—artificial structures that determine how we move through space and relate to others and the world around us. But, all too often these cities feel fixed, designed and determined by larger powers that shape a landscape that the average denizen has little direct influence over. So what would a responsive

Photo of construction workers standing around a monopod with a camera
Skanska puts 360-degree photography to work on New York job sites

Three-sixty-degree photography on construction sites is sort of like Google Street View at a smaller scale—a worker walks through a job site with a monopod or sometimes even with a helmet-mounted set of cameras and captures the sights and sounds at all angles. And the technology has become a boon for Skanska, especially for projects

Construction workers at work on a metal frame.
How Skanska is putting 3D scanning to work in New York City

The Swedish multinational construction and development company Skanska is responsible for many of the world’s biggest building projects. Right now in New York City alone, it is overseeing two massive infrastructural and architectural undertakings: The Moynihan Train Hall and the LaGuardia Terminal B redevelopment. The design and construction of these projects are being reshaped by

Seoul’s Robot Science Museum will be its own first exhibition

The soon-to-be-built Robot Science Museum in Seoul, South Korea, will be a robotics exhibition itself. The museum, to be designed by Turkish firm Melike Altınışık Architects (MAA), will be built by robots when construction begins next year. In this way, the construction of the building itself will be the museum’s “first exhibition,” according to principal

Still from Project Correl
Zaha Hadid Architects launches a collaborative VR experiment

Virtual reality is often an individual experience, with one user shaping and traversing a preprogrammed digital realm. But what if complete strangers could gather together within the virtual realm to construct an architectural edifice? Project Correl is an experiment by the Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Group(ZHVR) in what it describes as “multi-presence virtual reality,” where users can

New virtual reality program could transform historic preservation

In October 2018, Switzerland-based 3-D-graphics software company Imverse released a public beta version of its LiveMaker modeling tool. This powerful virtual reality interface allows for the transformation of 2-D inputs into immersive 3-D environments. While the use of VR in the field of architecture and design is by no means novel, it has primarily remained a tool for

Walmart is using virtual reality to train employees

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is being applied to a broad range of applications, from architectural rendering to medical training. Now, retail giant Walmart is introducing the use of Oculus GO headsets to upgrade training at outlets across the country. Walmart plans to ship four of the headsets to every Walmart Supercenter, and two headsets to

Kilograph gains recognition for VR-based architectural rendering

On August 28, creative visualization studio Kilograph was recognized by CGarchitect’s 2018 Architectural 3D Awards Competition for its Suspension House project. Suspension House is a collaboration with San Francisco-based architectural practice Fougeron Architecture. Kilograph was initially commissioned by the firm for marketing illustrations but made the case that a virtual experience would allow the client

Marriott’s “Portal to Paradise” provides an AR glimpse of resort destinations

For the fastidious traveler, research and planning are essential first steps to a relaxing vacation. On June 19th, to provide the curious tourist a glimpse of potential destinations, Marriott Caribbean & Latin American Resorts launched the iOS application “Portal to Paradise.” The iOS app is an augmented reality simulation allowing consumers to explore eight of

Lowe’s is testing the use of VR and AR as a means to boost commercial sales

To compete with online retailers, brick-and-mortar retailers are turning towards augmented and virtual reality tools to attract consumers. Lowe’s Innovation Labs is experimenting with virtual and augmented reality to boost retail sales. Programs such as Holoroom How-To and Holoroom Test Drive allow users to visualize and experience products prior to purchase. The Innovation Labs are

Switzerland-based Imverse is generating virtual reality software with creative architectural applications

Imverse, a Switzerland-based 3D computer graphics company, is pushing forward with immersive virtual reality experiences with potential architectural applications. Imverse’s Elastic Time, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, is a mixed reality documentary experience that allows the user to see their own body hologram with unlimited freedom of movement. The volumetric 3D environment provides

Artist Mel Chin will take over Times Square with AR nautical ruins

Artist Mel Chin is bringing two new installations to Times Square’s Broadway plazas this summer. Wake and Unmoored are part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-location exhibition produced by the Queens Museum and the public art nonprofit No Longer Empty. Other locations involved with the citywide exhibition are the Queens Museum and the Broadway–Lafayette/Bleeker Street subway station, which is hosting a May

Immersive technology may be architecture’s best tool for communication

This year’s Tech+ conference—an upcoming and groundbreaking event showcasing technological innovators in the AEC industry taking place on May 22 in New York City—will feature pioneering speakers that are rethinking existing technological paradigms. Among them is Iffat Mai, practice application development leader for Perkins + Will, who will be co-presenting a discussion about enhanced realities and immersive experiences. As