The design process in the AEC industry today requires many changes and constant checkins with clients throughout the process. The faster these checkins can occur, the more design iterations can be completed, leading to better designs. The current process of sending models to clients via email or FTP and scheduling calls or waiting for emails to receive feedback are slow and onerous.
Over the past few years Virtual Reality technology has been making tremendous progress, and is no longer a toy of graphics and gaming enthusiasts. This progress has not gone unnoticed by the AEC industry, and many are starting to explore how VR software and equipment enables new and exciting ways of interacting and exploring their designs.
A product of the AEC Hackathon 2.3 - SoCal (Summer 2015), team VRML (Virtual Review Management Loop) explored ways for (A) designers to share their models faster and (B) clients to virtually experience those models. Out of this exploration came a process for virtual design review based in the browser. In this process, designers can share their model with clients via a URL, enabling clients to review the design easily from their browsers - no additional software installations necessary. Then, as the client asks for changes to the model, the designer can implement those changes to the model (using their favorite design tool) in real time. The client can then refresh their page (using the same url) to see the updated model with their requested changes.
The sample workflow below helps outlines how this process occurs.
The process starts with the designer, producing the model on their laptop in Revit. When they're ready to get client feedback, they can export their model to .obj format and upload that model to the server.
The designer can send a unique url to their client, which will direct them to the server to load that .obj model along with html and javascript for rendering it in their browser. The client can then explore the model with their mouse, or with a VR headset (Occulus Rift DK2 or Google Cardboard) if they have one available. This rendering is all done using Three.js library for WebGL.
As the client has feedback on the model, the designer can then begin modifying the model and push a new version of the model up to the server for the client to view again in their browser (after a refresh to load the new model). This process can repeat as often as necessary, as fast as the client and the designer can communicate.
This project is being posted to document how we accomplished this using various existing technologies and stimulate follow on work. There is very little novel or interesting technical contribution here, other than wrangling all the parts together. This was a challenge in and of itself, since the Oculus Rift DK2 is still very new and the WebVR is an evolving web API standard (still in draft mode). To make the browser rendering work using ThreeJS, we hobbled together resources from the following locations:
- ThreeJS dev branch - base three.[min.]js file, plus OBJLoader, VREffects and VRControls.
- VRPolyfill - Helpful polyfill for browsers and supporting cardboard on other browsers here
- VRManager - Handy utility utility for managing the vr experience
The browser VR experience is tested on the Rift DK2 and Google cardboard. We used Dropbox to synchronize the model between the designer's machine and the server, which was running a simple http static file server.
To run the code:
- download the repository
- replace the broken symlink for assets/model.obj with the actual model file you want to serve (or a symlink to it) (Currently this code can only serve an .obj file, but small tweaks could make it serve any format ThreeJS supports)
- Run a server in the same repository (we used
python -m SimpleHTTPServer) - Navigate to http://localhost:8000/ in a browser (you'll need a browser that supports webVR if you want to use the VR capabilities. We used the custom [chrome nightly branch with support for WebVR] (https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BzudLt22BqGRbW9WTHMtOWMzNjQ).