Within the past years, no technology has been more hyped up or promising than virtual reality. Everyone from large tech companies to emerging startups is investing in the technology to pay off. VR-powered solutions provide the ability to transport users to an entirely new experience or area in the world! Every sector from corporate training and gaming to marketing and healthcare is being transformed by the disrupted technology. Remarkably, the design landscape is no exception!
Like so many advanced technologies, virtual reality is taking the world of design with flying colors. From designing spaces to decorating rooms, VR technology is transforming the way people create the places they work and live. The market predictions are optimistic IDC reported that estimating global revenues for virtual reality and augmented reality will grow from 5.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 to more than 162 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. Statista expects AR/VR market size will reach 209.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2022, while Research and Markets more conservatively estimate the market will generate revenues of 55 billion U.S. dollars by 2021. Still not convinced?
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How does VR technology work?
Virtual reality works by making your brain believe that you are in a 3D environment that is different from the place you are actually in. Using two slightly different angles to create this 3D effect, it provides an accurate view and depth perception of all the different elements you are seeing, just as they would be if in front of you in reality. Even though this has predominantly been used in the gaming or entertainment industry so far, other sectors have now started to explore the benefits that it may be able to bring to them too.
What are the benefits of VR-powered solutions?
Virtual reality is transforming the way how designers, architects and clients interpret design, and the technology promises a brighter future and more benefits to come. Sounds impressive, right? But what are they? Let’s jump right in!
1. Delivering unique experience
With VR-fueled solutions, potential customers can engage with the immersive environment they are in and preview how an item will look in their home. Changing colors and materials of walls, floors, cabinets, and many other objects of furniture on the fly and the ability to walk through space, seeing these changes, will help potential customers to visualize and ‘feel’ their dream home before they ever make a purchase.
2. Pre-construction troubleshooting
With VR-powered solutions, you can identify any potential design or logistical flaws. That’s why errors can easily be avoided by navigating through and fully analyzing the planned project. Tweaking the position of a window, the width of a door, or the layout of furniture in VR gives the flexibility to experiment with a variety of options and critically analyze the work, all before laying a single brick.
3. Simulating Real-World Scenarios
Taking real-world subjects and actually seeing how they interact with their environment are vital for health and safety. VR-based solutions provide the ability to immerse ‘real people’ into spaces and ask them to navigate their way through various scenarios.
As an example, you can test your emergency exit systems by placing someone in an obscure part of a building and seeing how quickly they can exit using the signage system you’ve put into place, or test fire simulations to see how long it takes for them to evacuate and also evaluate how intuitive the evacuation routes are within a building. Also, it is increasingly advantageous to make use of virtual reality to better understand and optimize lighting or cooling loads and the overall shape of the building.
4. Speed up the Approval Process
Sometimes an architect or designer has a fantastic idea that is too difficult to explain and time-consuming to implement. With VR-powered solutions, there is an ability to communicate your vision with greater clarity and gain the trust of clients. You can just immerse them in the VR environment and let them ‘feel’ that space. As a result, they are more informed to make decisions with speed and confidence by experiencing a true-to-scale space.
5. Mobile & Desktop Friendly
VR is a multi-platform tool and can be used without a headset and a powerful PC. If you want to provide a 360-degree virtual tour, you just need mobile and desktop access. Prospects can effortlessly download a 360 virtual tour onto their mobile device in a click and still enjoy a virtual experience.
4 great VR-powered apps and experience you can try
VR tools are becoming more and more popular in the design landscape. What’s more, they provide a more immersive, seamless, and exceptional experience of architectural designs as well as products and areas related to space building. Let’s take a closer look at them!
1. Put your idea into life with Planner 5D
This VR-powered solution is a great tool for interior designers and home decorators to create 2D/3D designs based on their skill level. This tool helps to easily build a floor or home plan, décor decorate your apartment or house, etc. Gathering home ideas of your dream house is not a problem anymore. You can render photorealistic high-definition 3D designs to see concepts in reality with VR headsets. Also, you can collaborate with colleagues, share designs with friends, export high-quality images, add furniture from an integrated manufacturer’s catalog like IKEA, etc.
2. Break new ground with iStaging
Being a VR-fueled app, it provides excellent opportunities if you want to try out various color schemes for your apartment or house and select the pieces of furniture in accordance with the style. With a VR-based app worked in real-time, you can see a piece of furniture in actual size that helps to shed light on what ‘feels right. The app requires a VR headset that will provide you with a 360-degree view virtually. Professional designers can utilize the app to present their projects to their potential clients.
3. Create gorgeously designed spaces with Decorilla
Decorilla’s new VR-fueled app helps to create gorgeously designed spaces based on customers’ style, but also their budget. Potential customers have an excellent opportunity to see what a completely empty room might look like fully furnished. Being do it yourself system will offer you designs for your home before anything is being actually put in the physical world. With a VR-powered app, prospects can see the unique design or alter it on the fly, move physical furniture within their apartments or homes in real-time.
4. Accelerate the approval process with Live Home 3D
With that VR-powered app, you can quickly, easily, and precisely finish plans and add furniture in every room in the house. What’s more, you can edit them as you would as if it was saved from your preferred system or share design as either images or videos that allow a complete 360-degree view of various rooms. Also, some sections, the entire floor or even the whole interior, can be transformed into a 3D model that can be used to tour the house for client presentations. With these options, you can exhibit your design in formats most convenient for your customers and speed up the approval process.
Bottom line: Are you ready to enrich your VR experience in design?
Nowadays, VR-powered solutions are much more advanced and allow us to create realistic virtual scenarios that outrace anything that the mid-1990s technology had to offer. Virtual reality software opens the way for architects, engineers, and designers. Nevertheless, many companies of any size still avoid using VR-fueled software solutions whether it’s because of fear of the unknown, or because they think it’s too expensive.
VR technology is improving and offering the opportunity to showcase your work in brand new ways. If your competitors start using it before you do, you may end up falling behind the pack. As a result, you need to put some serious thought into adopting VR. Believe it or not, VR technology is the next big thing. Increasingly popular, it is revolutionizing the way we create the worlds around us. From popular game consoles to decorating the interior, it is getting more widespread and accessible.
The rise of VR-powered apps opens up potential than ever before when creating gorgeously designed spaces or collaborating with colleagues. Don’t hesitate to try these VR-powered apps or any other software solutions to be on the roll in design!
Andrew Lozun is the Chief Innovation Officer at ServReality that provides a full range of web and mobile solutions – virtual, augmented and mixed reality, artificial intelligence, machine, and deep learning, neural networks, and natural language processing – to reinvent business vision, drive transformation and make significant progress.
