How VR can facilitate architects technologically

Info

Check this video here!

Architects are the essential part for designing the house. Here I have taken a few interviews and analysed the data in order to identify what technological improvements architect needs to smoothen the communication between their clients and Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing and Structural (MEP) personnel. As Virtual Reality is one of the emerging technology my last analysis and interview questions were leading towards the novel interactions, ease of communication and innovative idea for designing in Virtual Reality environment.

Architects have so many tools to facilitate themselve with the designing the house faster and better but there are still communication gaps exist between the client and architect and also with MEP and architects and as the technology advances now we have Virtual Reality [5]. It is a powerful tool which can help you experience the stuff which was previously only can be seen in 2D spaces.

My goal is to identify the need of the architects and try to make a tool that will be the extension of their existing modelling tool [4] but it will help them show their design better and reduce the communication time between the whole process because even though with new modelling software they go back and forth for the design iterations with the users and MEP personnel and it takes them a significant amount of time spending over phones and emails.

Over the ThanksGiving period of 2017, I had chance to interview some architects with vast amount of experience(>15 years) in the field of architecture. I have divided those interviews into 3 parts. First part was about the architects communication with the client, second part was about the architects communication with the MEP personnel and third part was the interaction within the VR for ease of use for the communication for the before mentioned. Here I have taken total of 5 architectural interviews and in that I have 3 architects which have really long industry experience about 15+ years and other 2 have really less experience of <3 years. The reasoning behind this kind of skewing is to get the idea of what young new architects have to say about technology compared to old but for seasoned one.

Other info

Qualitative and Quantative Analysis of Data collection and Interview of different architects

Technology used

Unity, VR, Unity Networking