My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-first approach. Schematic design starts in 3D using Rhino3D or Revit. We use visualization plugins, like Enscape, to render the models and stream to a Quest 3 headset.
So when clients come in, and feels adventurous, we'll setup the headset, set the display height to their actual, and let them walk around their beautiful new home.
The response has been powerful. My clients are able to truly understand the scale, the proportion of rooms, ceiling heights, and the smallest details.
We're able to make real-time changes to the model (within reason) and provide instant design feedback.
I've been using this technology for years and I'm surprised it's not being adopted faster - good for us right now though!
This comment almost made me quit my job and pursue my original passion in architecture. So the job was, all along, as fun as I imagined it… And the full-stack knowledge to make it happen is still rare? I am currently designing my house in Blender and was planning to import it into Unreal Engine to make it navigable. HN has a way of serving me the content I’m looking for at the right time…
I want to learn how to import into Unreal Engine... also throw a rocket launcher in there with some destruction physics.
I will caution tho, converting the Rhino models back into CAD for construction drawings, etc. is time consuming. One of my architects is skilled in Revit, but we haven't explored the real time rendering / 3d visualization abilities enough with it.
Revit is parametric, but something like Rhino (going off reputation, never used it myself) gives you more free-form modeling control.
It’s like starting with a pencil sketch instead of going straight to SolidWorks, once you start building that more nailed down drawing with its explicit flow of sketches and operations in relationship to each other, it becomes much harder to make large structural changes.
Rhino + Grasshopper is the gold standard for all the curvy geometry in anything resembling Zaha Hadid’s work. It is also parametric. There’s even a plug-in to use it inside Revit. Solidworks is great for designing the chassis, but the body was probably sketched in Rhino or Maya.
Do it! You have the knowledge, you have the interest, you now have confirmation someone else was able to do it, so can you! No time to wait, just jump in and start planning, then execute! I don't know why people hesitate so much, you do literally only live once, and who has time to sit around thinking "what if?" when we're old and just want to chill? Worst case scenario, you fail, learned a bunch, lean back on what supported you before, maybe in a slightly different way, but with so many more fun memories.
They're a developer, money is probably a pretty weak excuse.
True, the job market is worse than it's been before, but it'll also eventually get better, as before. Things go up and down, can't really skip out on your dreams just because it's a bit difficult, then you're just giving up as easily as everyone else. Gotta fight a little :)
You might want to look at these videos with regards to using archviz in Unreal Engine with a photogrammetry visual set. BIM output can be used if you have more experience with architectural CAD toolsets. The plugins are available now except the BIM which is slated to be open by the end of August/Summer.
Uhh, I have a laptop near me where I was planning to throw my drawing to get a 3D model in blender. I have no experience with blender, but I have a dwg file architect gave me (for a house where I already live in) and I was ready to make AI do the rest. I want to make some reconstruction, plan to buy/calculate stuff I need for the walls/floor, etc and just a fun project to visualize my home.
Anyways, I learned that AI can't read DWG, so converted it to DXF using trial AutoCAD. The LibreCAD couldn't even open my dwg as it was some newer version.
I also have a plan to make some "what-if" scenarios - we want to remodel kitchen, remove this wall, put this here and there... basically that can help visualize and that can understand how big stuff is to calculate BOM and such.
Is Blender OK for it or should I target some SketchUp for my "3D feel"? I'm looking forward to using some free tools.
Is there even a free cad alternative that would understand "newer" dwg file formats? Is there other software than AutoCAD with MCP capability that would allow navigate dwg/dxf?
For those that don’t know, the Hamptons are full of very nice places. The uber-rich have second homes, there, that are bigger than Gold Coast first homes.
This company probably makes a lot of money, but they also have serious competition, so they need things like the 3D walkthroughs.
Summer traffic in the Hamptons is a nightmare, though. Many uber-rich have helipads.
You are 100% correct. My company is fortunate enough to have the working capital and time to explore ideas, which is honestly, one of the most fulfilling parts of my business.
And the Hamptons competition is very serious. It's insane really. Construction in the Hamptons is the Olympics of high-end building. There are atleast a dozen excellent, amazing builders and over 250 active companies in total. My company sits near the top of that list and the only one, to my knowledge, actively leveraging technology to our advantage.
No private heli-pads, they banned it long ago. There's a little known heli-pad on Meadow Lane in Southampton. So from your SoHo office to your beachfront house is under an hour. There's also Blade service to EH.
One of my clients often arrives by seaplane to check on the progress of his Peconic Bay waterfront project. It's pretty cool.
I did this circa 2021 (with SketchUp, Enscape, Quest 2) during our house remodel. It was very successful in reducing the number of walls my wife wanted to move around after they had been finished
Me and my partner did this as well, only using a HTC Vive. We modeled our bathroom in two different versions and could toggle between the two while "standing inside" the bathroom. The VR simulation was the deciding factor between the two layouts, as one just "felt" better in person.
Do you recommend an application in particular to make it easy to do something like that (record a video walk through that you turn into a rendering on a PC in VR)? I happen to have a Valve Index with dust on it.
And I mean for someone with no specialized architect/design skills.
Speaking of which, it seems like evolution in the headset world is slow or stalled at least commercially.
My house has definitely been opened up over time since I bought it. Not really the upstairs but the ground floor is much more open and lighter. In fact, it's where I mostly do stuff on a laptop in spite of having a full-fledged office upstairs.
There is a continual stream of TV programs about housing which tell you every problem can be solved by knocking a wall down, building an extension, installing bi-fold doors or a granite worktop.
If your partner watches this stuff then you are in trouble.
Heh. Like 10 years ago I was designing retail stores for a company expanding their franchises. Each location had to be a bit different, depending on the quirks of the building they were leasing. I was doing the 3D layouts of the interiors, so I built a webvr app to let them jump through the renderings (not a walk-around; it mapped out a bunch of different fully raytraced stereoscopic skyboxes from different positions that you could navigate between). We used to send out an oculus rift to the new franchisees while they were in the build phase so they could check out the renderings and request changes as we were finalizing it.
Do you find the value of VR/AR to be in the communication of design intent to clients unfamiliar with traditional 2D representations, or do your designers leverage VR/AR during the design development process as well?
Absolutely both. Internally, we'll model something, move an element, etc., and we're able to evaluate the idea until it feels right.
For clients, I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation does nothing for them. They will nod, make comments, and play along, but until you sketch a person into the drawing, they don't even understand that the front door is ten feet tall.
"I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation"
I think 2D prints aren't the baseline, and since at least the late 2000s even run of the mill architecture firms have been using 3d studio-type renderings with clients. Maybe I don't understand how the visionpro works. Your clients arent actually physically moving their body, right? What's the advantage of looking around the space in a visionpro vs large monitor?
I’ve been through this (but with different software than the author used). The level of immersion, the sense of being there, is dramatically better with the Vision Pro.
It was the biggest unlock when it came to choosing a staircase design. Hard to picture ahead of time and expensive to change later.
I worked with DUS Architects in Amsterdam on a staircase designer / visualizer for their enormous fused deposition modelling (FDM) 3D house printers, using Rhino + Grasshopper + Unity3D.
"Complexity is free when you are drawing with a nozzle."
One thing about their use of plant-based bioplastic is that if you didn't like your staircase or house after printing it, you could shred it, melt it back down, redesign it, and print out a different one again.
>On a plot in Amsterdam-Noord, DUS Architects turned a six-metre FDM printer called the KamerMaker into a research laboratory disguised as a house — extruding honeycomb rooms from plant-based bioplastic to ask whether a building can be downloaded, printed on site, and shredded back into feedstock when it is done.
>The KamerMaker: a desktop printer, grown enormous
>The instrument at the centre of the project is a machine called the KamerMaker — Dutch for "room maker" — installed on the site from September 2012. Conceptually it is disarmingly simple: it is a fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer, the same layer-by-layer, melt-and-extrude technology found in a hobbyist desktop machine, scaled up until it stands roughly six metres tall inside a movable, container-sized pavilion. It was developed by DUS in dialogue with the desktop-printing world — the Ultimaker community was part of that lineage — and it can print single elements up to about 2.2 × 2.2 × 3.5 metres.
Much earlier (1997-2000) I worked on The Sims architectural editing tools for walls, floors, windows, doors, swimming pools, ladders, diving boards, object placement, etc, including the staircase placement tool, which was extra tricky because it spanned two stories, punched holes in the floor, and reserved two contiguous floor landing tiles upstairs and downstairs. Orchestrating the undo/redo edit records in the right order was diabolical. ;)
The Anti-Heisenberg Teleporter added by House Party was not actually classified as a staircase although it spanned two floors and had landing tiles. But it worked since the staircase tool (and other specialized tools like windows, doors, pool ladders and diving boards, etc) were actually just special modes of the generic universal object placement tool.
Stairs Aesthetics In Every Sims - Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4
I'm amazed hearing about how your skills and knowledge extend to multiple disciplines. First time I've heard of DUS Architects - this is real modern architecture, sitting the crossroads of art and science. Very cool.
> What's the advantage of looking around the space in a visionpro vs large monitor?
A lot of people don't grasp scale correctly when looking at a monitor. It's not an intrinsic skill in the same way that our perception of being inside a 3D space is
Really? Who? I've worked with two dozen AD100 Architecture firms. Most will farm out a couple static renders that will never again be updated throughout the evolution of the project.
Yes, they can move around if they want. We set a boundary in the foyer of my office, so they have about 15 feet of movement.
If you haven't ever put on a 3D headset, it's hard to describe the advantage. Do I think it's 100% necessary vs. just looking at a screen, no, but it's cool.
Are there any productive tools or workflows you employ for modeling directly in VR? Or is it more useful for review and evaluation of models developed on traditional workstations?
I'm AEC adjacent and am trying to talk myself into picking up a pair strictly for personal architectural projects..
We really only use it for architectural intent. There is a dream that is BIM on residential projects, but unless the project has an extreme level of technical constrains, it's often cost prohibitive to model EVERYTHING. I'm really hoping that AI assisted design tools will bridge the gap. Imagine uploading architectural and structural drawings and AI correctly modeling HVAC duct size, mechanical room requirements for pumps, boilers, etc., modeling electrical chases, vent pipes, exhaust ducts, ERVs, etc., in a local code compliant manner. I know it's coming and I can't freaking wait.
We have on occasion used our Matterport 3 lidar scanner to model existing structural conditions to help us figure out a problem.
Re Matterport 3 - we use it as a communication tool for remote work sessions with engineers, architects, clients, etc. Saves everyone a trip to the site. Helps us document progress, preserve historical details, uncover discrepancies between field and plan, etc.
Wow I’m incredibly impressed that you’ve decided to embrace VR technology. When renovating our house, it was incredibly hard (and still is) to visualize how everything. So far we just got lucky but the basement is going to be a challenge as we’re making structural adjustments.
How did you get your team to get onboard with the process? How is the ROI?
My team design team are graduate architects, on the younger-ish side - 29 and 40. One worked for Santiago Calatrava - who, if you know, obviously models all his work. So it was second nature to them, I just pushed them to lean into it. Rhino is not without its drawbacks. It is time consuming but it's worth it because, as a sales tool, it wins every time. I'll have first time meetings with perspective clients where we'll wireframe a design on their survey (if we know some particulars of the program). Blows people away.
The ROI - the salaries were a negative on the books for two years, but now we're choosing our projects, ones that any AD100 firm would kill for.
Not vr/ar but 3d visualisations and walkthroughs were a thing like 20 years ago. I did try to leverage it with the clients but what happened was that once people could see everything they had more opinions about how to change it. It helped me to get clients though. Sometimes it would go on for quite a ”few” iterations. I think it is more scalable not to do it, i.e. not to be on the cutting edge, unless the customer pays premium for it. I am pretty sure vr/ar has the same challenges where people are like “oh I thought the ceiling was higher, can we increase it by 2 inches and move the stair case a bit?” then you do it and something is wrong again.
I'd see that as evidence that the visualization is doing its job. It's much cheaper to discover "I wish the ceiling were 2" higher" before anyone starts building than after. The challenge is reducing the cost of each iteration. That's where newer tooling starts to matter.
I really hope that one day I am so incredibly rich that I can hire a team like yours. It would be amazing to have a professional firm design a house for you. I’m guessing you have to be in the 1% for that.
This comment got me curious, as it felt attainable/more commonplace to me. I did some searching, and according to gov.uk stats 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes. That is actually surprisingly high!
Impressive. Where I live you get a flat assigned and you put your old furniture in. Maybe you paint the walls, but they have to be white when you move out.
If you are doing well for yourself you buy a house from a project. It will be 150 identical homes next to each other. If you pay extra you get to decide the color of the kitchen and what tiles you want in the pre-designed bathroom.
It's quite common in the USA ... but since we have massive sprawl they will build whole neighborhoods at once, give you a choice of 5-10 different model homes and then you can customize on top of that. Sometimes a customization can be a whole floor.
If the builder does it correctly you really have to squint to tell which homes are the exact same since they are all slightly different.
> 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes
Worth to note that there is a huge practical difference between a "custom" and a "self-build" home.
- On "self-build" you take full personal responsibility for finding land, securing planning permission, managing the budget, and hiring architects or builders.
- On "custom" you buy from a developer who already has pre-approved planning permissions, often for a huge serviced plot targeting 20-30 homes based on some copy/paste concept, managing all aspects of the construction while you can influence minor aspects of the layout, style, and interior finishes.
Custom-built homes are very common in rest of Europe. It's a common scheme to buy a plot of land, plan a low-cost project of very densely placed, similar looking houses, reusing as many elements as possible to simplify permissions, and then allowing customers to pay for additions within those fixed boundaries.
The possible individual modifications are usually minor then, everything that requires re-submission for (structural/council/...) approval is not economic.
Then there's the "I self-build, my dad is a carpenter and I just bought this toolbox" category, which is such a minefield of fatal mistakes that movies and reality shows were made around it.
I think the market for "self-build but fully outsourced to a premium developer" is the ~1-2% bracket only...
I guess I'm in the .001%: my father in law built homes for a living and built his own home and every piece of furniture in it himself. Everything lasts longer and works better than in professionally built homes in my experience. He's a real marvel.
I suspect there may not many more people with his skillset after his generation passes.
Agreed, and from the people I know who fully self-build say they will never do it again. The amount of decisions and time it takes can be very stressful.
But when you go to very high end neighborhoods where you essentially pick a plot and a architect, no 2 homes are close to the same, all completely custom.
I would bet a lot of those are still not being designed by a team that is working for you specifically. It's also important that if the statistic is 7-10% of homes, that's very different from 7-10% of people living in such homes.
For a lot of building projects you need both pictures to send the government to get permission before you break ground; and also evidence of the structural calculations, and that the structural elements were built to design.
You can do these things without an architect, but there's enough demand to support an ecosystem of small businesses (say, 1 architect and 2 support staff). Not every project/architect uses a full 3D model - some architects produce a set of 2D drawings.
Can you please do a separate post about your job? The technology sounds amazing and I'd love to know how AI is now interacting with this stack. Also, which firm? Might need a design soon!
Wait, you actually have an empty building/area the size of a typical custom design home? Aren't those typically rather huge? Do you partition the previews?
Okay I have to ask - do the joysticks move you forward like they typically would for a character in a video game? Or do you use teleport controls? Because the former would absolutely make me (and I think most people?) motion sick
It's the Hamptons, these houses are for some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
I'd make them wear a giant visor over their face rather than have to talk to them directly too. They're also some of the most insufferable people you'll ever meet.
But reality is never as perfect as the design. It seems to me that being able to "stand" in a rendering and look around is going to put you much closer to reality than looking at blueprints and a front elevation. So i don't think the question is "could VR and the end product be different" it is "is VR closer to the end product than other options" and I think the answer is likely, yes.
Hey mate, I'm a builder in Sydney, Australia and I'm currently trying to implement something very similar in my business. I'd love to connect and have a chat about the ins and outs if you'd be open to it?
If you could reach out that would be awesome. My email is in my bio. Or reply to this comment if you need another form of contact.
Do you believe Apple will continue to spend billions on a device that caters to niche enterprise use cases and is today selling in single digit thousands per month, if that? If so, qhat other Apple products out there suggest that enterprise is something Apple cares about enough to maintain a distinct product line? This isn't Mac Pro where 95% of the R&D and production costs are shared with half a dozen other major Mac SKUs. This isn't MacOS. It isn't iOS. It isnt even iPad OS which it was initially based on. Excepting the SoC, the hardware is entirely bespoke. It doesn't seem realistic to me that they'd continue it without a real consumer audience that the last 2.5 years proved does not exist. Hell, even the lowly Quest, that cost Meta over $100B so far, sold nearly 30M units and Meta's clearly bailing on that as it pivots to non-enclosed facial computers like glasses. The whole category is a failure outside of a few enterprise cases.
The comment your replying to used Quest 3. No need for Apple. Steam Frame will probably have a color camera module too and be even more flexible as a real computer.
Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/
Just like the article says: Within a second after putting on the headset you just know if things are proportioned right, or need some fine tuning. That's really valuable!
Also, when the house was actually (partially) built, it felt exactly like the simulations we knew pretty well by that point.
> Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/
Coincidentally enough, author of the submission ended up calling their thing "Prospector"
> After some intense typing with a combination of Claude and Codex over the course of a morning I had something I was pretty happy with. I named it Prospector (can’t remember why) and I’ve been really happy with it.
I can't help but think that the author asked the LLM for suggestions on the name, and Prospector/Prospect was recommended as it was so similar to an existing thing, but I might be reading too much into it.
Leveling this up: Calculate sun angles at different times of the year to simulate light entering the house. Find out if some room is going to be unbearably hot in the summer because it's got too much full sunlight; make sure there are windows that can take maximum advantage of sunlight in the winter months; maximize opportunities to accidentally catch the sunset / sunrise.
I did this. Less so for the sun light entering the windows (albeit a great idea), but more so for making sure I'd see the sunsets. There are great websites that will let you see the sunrise and sunset directions for any given day of the year.
Awnings are your friend, particularly on windows facing the equator. It's not very difficult to calculate all the ways sun will hit a window throughout the year and design an awning to block the sun in the summer but not the winter.
1000%. If you have the luxury/curse of _building_ the house on empty land simulating light is extremely important imo. It determines everything from layout of rooms to window placement to furnishing etc. (You probably don’t want eg sun behind TV). Even ants orient their dwellings with respect to sunlight.
Christian is a brilliant developer, that made simply the best experience for reddit that ever existed; after the ban, and when Apollo was dead, I simply stopped consuming reddit (other than an occasional kagi search that takes me there).
I hope he knows that a lot of iOS users really appreciate his work, (I even convinced one hardcore Android user to get an iPhone just for this one app, it was that good).
Like many others, I said I’d quit Reddit when they killed Apollo. I was skeptical that I’d actually follow through, but it didn’t end up being a sacrifice at all. The official app sucks so hard it isn’t fun to browse, and now that the mobile site forces you to download the app, I don’t even look at posts from search results much anymore.
The official app is so bad that basically all quality posters left, along with practically all decent moderators except power-tripping assholes who are happy as long as they have a ban button.
Reddit's post quality dropped so hard after they killed off the API. It's night and day.
then you got companies astroturfing their own subreddits cough /r/snowflake pumping their own fake comments about using whatever AI nonsense they have and relentlessly downvote anything questioning if the content in the sub is even real lmao. this thread had me in tears https://www.reddit.com/r/snowflake/comments/1uoioz6/coco_gui... the mod of that sub de-modded the snowflake employees and there's a sticky now talking about what to do about snowflake fake engagement. lmao that subreddit is a prime example of how the utility of subreddits has pretty much evaporated
it's so funny how corporations throw literally everything they have to control narratives and it just drives people away. all companies tried so hard to have a twitter presence and that site is now nothing but a wasteland of sports journalism and racist bots.
but yeah, reddit sucks. it can't decide what it wants to be but it sure is barreling towards yet another crappy scrolly social media platform
My use of Reddit also drastically reduced after Apollo stopped working (I didn’t follow the instructions that many others have been to sideload the app, configure with an API token, etc.).
But I found a couple of ways to browse without using the official app. One is Safari, with the free SinkIt for Reddit extension, and another is a free app called Lurker. The Lurker app is nowhere close to the speed and smoothness of Apollo. It also seems to drain the battery quicker, but the UI is relatively clean.
I don't have the app and I use reddit (although not often) via my mobile browser (firefox) and it never forced me to download the app, as far as I recall.
I encountered that blocker today, so I decided to try Safari's Hide Distracting Items (1) feature, which blocked it once and for all, which I was pretty impressed by.
It does it occasionally to me (Safari on iOS). When it happens, I just close the page. I hope this is enough of a signal to make someone think.
I land on Reddit every couple of days or so, and if they don’t kick me I read the thread and sometimes browse a bit a couple of subreddits I used to participate in.
Yeah my phone was doing that for a while. I just took it as a sign that maybe I should spend less time on Reddit. After a while it stopped gating me. Not sure if that was a measured decision on their end, or just that the experiment ended.
Bars! My friends and I constantly talk about how good Apollo was. I've tried side loading with alt store as well, but I can't seem to keep it stable, it crashes, fails, etc.
I’ve said it in a few other places here before, but axing Apollo is the reason I’m on HN at all.
I used to use Reddit daily to follow a few games and news subs, and was fairly active in a couple of those communities as a contributor.
But I don’t know that I miss Reddit all that much, save for a few small corners of the community. The discourse here is a lot more thoughtful, generally, and the community aspect is what I enjoy the most.
Christian’s work on Apollo made me hopeful that good app devs will continue to exist (shoutout to HACK for iOS, it’s a great HN reader), and I’m glad he seems to be doing something pretty cool with his time
You can use Apollo reborn still with your own API keys. I personally use a modded reddit app on Android or old.reddit in Firefox. Reddit is way too valuable to stop using entirely. I also use it in LLMs asking them to reference reddit if I am looking for specific suggestions.
Apollo was for users, reddit main purpose isn't for the user anymore. How would they get rid of r/all with all the 3rd party clients around? Much harder when you don't control the full experience.
I have 2 subreddits I still look at, and I can only bear to use old.reddit, new.* is such a hot mess. I should just leave reddit entirely, but /r/localllama does surface some stuff early that takes quite a while to make it here and other tech hubs.
> I should just leave reddit entirely, but /r/localllama does surface some stuff early that takes quite a while to make it here and other tech hubs.
I do that every now and then but LocalLlama has become such a pain to read. Between the stupid memes, the useless benchmarks and the hype train of the week, I feel the signal to noise ratio has dropped significantly. I haven’t really found anything like what it was 1 or 2 years ago.
That's neat. Once it is built, I think a cooler use is to trace wiring and plumbing through your walls of your existing house. Your revit model may include all of this data, or at least the plan. Things change. :)
Though this is especially helpful for old homes where you have to sort of improvise ethernet wiring.
I normally just use it to consume 4k hdr media though.
It has not lived up to being a utility player device, but so far it is so good at media delivery that is sort of okay.
Good time to mention TwinMotion - a real-time archviz software from Epic, built on top of Unreal Engine. Free for personal and small-scale commercial use.
Basically, you do the geometry modelling in Sketchup, Blender or what have you, import that into TM, texture it, place lights and then walk around Doom style. VR headsets are supported natively. There is also a decent (and very easy to use) support for "scenarios", so you can open/close doors, turn on/off lights, etc.
Highly recommended.
PS. There is a free desktop version of Sketchup Make 2017. Got everything one needs for a single-person setup. There is a copy on the Internet Archive.
I hired him last year to run Ethernet cable in my existing house and he did a great job (the original homebuilder did not make it easy on him!) At the time he was placing random icons so they'd protrude onto the next floor. I guess he got some development done to use color-coded bars instead, and it's much better looking/accurate.
This is amazing! I'm guessing this can be used for creating 3D models of outdoor routes if you wore a vision pro on rappel? How accurate do you think it would be for "seeing into" cracks, at least deep enough to pick up the relevant details for gear placements and climbing movements?
Accurate reconstruction is entirely up to the camera's ability to orbit around the object. If we are talking about cracks, the visual signal will be very poor as we can't wiggle a camera inside a crack.
On the other hand, if we want a 3D reconstruction of a route in general, using a drone, then that's very doable. We still rely on 2D climbing magazine/book/app to view a route, where the contour of the route itself is highly desirably imo.
There are apps for displaying RevIt models on the Apple Vision Pro, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, iPhone ARKit, and Android AR [1], so if you are working with an architect it is worth asking them if they can provide in-progress models as you iterate to avoid having to reproduce them yourself.
It seems like everything here can also be done with any iPhone using ARKit. Obviously the headset is better, but not $3500 better than just looking through your phone.
Just thought I’d raise this since it weirdly isn’t mentioned in the article.
I used a similar technique the last time I moved - scan the apartment using the iPhone, then I had a 3D model for measuring and planning out the space before/during the move. It’s a big help when planning out furniture etc.
And I scanned my old place before leaving so I can virtually step into it any time I want. iPhone via finder/preview handles showing 3D models in AR out of the box.
Ive used various AR apps to see how products fit in physical spaces--like Ikea used to offer. I've also worked on VR projects for car interiors. With VR you really do get a sense of scale and space that you're still guessing at with AR on a phone. I really liked when people removed the VR headset they were surprised to be back in a small room.
Like you mentioned, Ive wanted to scan some spaces to remember them in the future. Last time I looked, those apps werent very easy to find or easy to use.
How did you actually end up doing it, like the full pipeline ? For example what app did you use to scan your apartment and orocesss it into a 3d model (which kind?) and then how do you actually do the planning (like which tools/software to plan your new space?)
And I ask for details because I have attempted something similar but wasn’t getting the best results. I was using ‘3d scanner app’ (which was good but was sold and is not recommended now), and that created pretty decent models, but like, they were still I think based on lidar and not super precise. I also wasn’t sure how to reconcile my actual floor plan with that 3d model the right way - like if the 3d model got some error built-up, the wall which I know to be 100 inches has to be that, and not 101 or 99, since for furniture planing an inch definitely matters. So I kind of got stuck here on how to actually generate some useful and as correct dimensionally as possible 3d model, into which I can later put furniture 3d models into. Thanks for any info!
I used Polycam. I’m not sure if it’s 100% accurate down to the inch - probably not but it was quite close. They have a floor plan editor now but I haven’t tried it.
As for planning the new space, I sketched it out - I might have used their tools, might have also just sketched it out on paper.
Once I had my plan, I marked it out using masking tape just to sanity check and everything fit as expected.
Looking through your phone at an AR object is not anywhere close to what VR offers. Maybe with a Google Cardboard / Google Daydream type experience. But not holding the phone out in front of you.
Obviously $3500 is not nothing for most people, but neither is building a house in this economy. I think the skillset of leveraging the provided code here and working with 3D models is gonna be a bigger barrier to entry than the cost of a Vision Pro.
This is an absolutely standard feature of any VR headset that has ever been released in the history of VR headsets. Make a 3D world, walk through it. What am I missing?
The most incredible tech on the planet is just a useless, Rube Goldberg machine without an application for the tech.
VR has lots of uses, but it takes someone outside the field who wouldn’t have given it a go otherwise to see another use and go “hey guys, you can do THIS too!”
These apps already exist in VR. There's even a few of them on the Meta Quest line of headsets which are also standalone. The issue is that most people, who are older than Gen Alpha, flat out refuse to use VR for various reasons so they're not going to be aware of any of this. It's just dismissed.
I think you deeply underestimate the value of good advertising and the charisma of the ones doing it - especially when they're sharing their story more than trying to sell you something.
We literally held stuff together with duct tape as the project also turned the Oculus into a VR + AR system. Taped 2 webcams to act as eyes as then you could toggle VR and AR.
Shipping it was stressful (renderer was in Ogre3D) and product fit well my face thanks to all the tape.
When I did this for a home remodel, the big difference was that it was AR and not just VR. Being able to experience where the virtual changes line up with the real world makes a huge difference.
Definitely a useful application for this but the article isn't doing AR at all, so it is just VR. The most common VR headset according to Steam can also do the same thing (but probably not as well).
"Ah yes, how hard could it be?", he confidently asks.
> What am I missing?
So much.
> This is an absolutely standard feature of any VR headset that has ever been released in the history of VR headsets
The article is describing "room scale positioning". The first consumer available headset to offer this was released in 2016.
It may feel like it's been around forever if you're not familiar with the space except as a consoomer, but exploring a 3d space at room scale has only recently come into the realm of possibility for consumer grade headsets. For much of the 80s and 90s (and 00s), it was head tracking only. Real time positioning and moving around required positioning hardware that was a magnitude more expensive - and pretty much always had very specific space limitations. Sure, it existed to some degree, but it was such inexpensive addition that using an expensive and complicated treadmill was often considered the economical choice.
In fact, I don't think there was even a "professional" solution that offered room scale positioning before the vive. Previously, they all had specific limitations like a 4 x 4 foot area or were massive tech demos that existed in a quantity of one in a university basement somewhere, running a very tailored demo, and they certainly weren't feasible in the 90s.
> Make a 3D world, walk through it.
First of all, how do you map the room? Do you set up lighthouses? Low latency positioning? To do what is in the article, you need a large space and the ability to map into it. Only recently, has "inside out" tracking become feasible. Previous generations didn't have it, and it's almost a guaranteed requirement for any large scale deployment of VR - for example, exploring multiple rooms.
Second, how do you create the "3d world"? It may seem simple, but VR headsets require more than double the graphical computation, and that means that any geometry and graphics you inert of the world needs to be within the compute budget of the headset solution. The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly out of fusion and have it render without hitting the compute budget limit is amazing and really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
Lastly, stitching, the 3-D solution and compositing, and the real world is a very difficult problem. Again, it may feel like we've had the technology, but really we haven't had the high speed camera solutions in small packages, and the compute power to process all of that in anything approaching a consumer solution. To do what AVP is doing with the USDZ files, composing them into the real world, and even applying lighting information, previously would have required a fleet of large and expensive machines. And that doesn't even include transparency and applying real-world attributes of lighting and reflection onto the USDZ file, a a task that's hard to parallelize.
> Only recently, has "inside out" tracking become feasible.
And the Vision Pro was far from the first to implement it. The most popular headsets in the world all use the tech, now. It's not 2016 anymore.
> The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly [...] really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
Is this a parody? The chip is a laptop-grade APU tethered to a power bank, and you're bragging about pixel-shading a <1000 tri mesh? Your mind will be blown when you discover what the Nintendo Switch can do with 10w.
> And the Vision Pro was far from the first to implement it. The most popular headsets in the world all use the tech, now. It's not 2016 anymore.
I didn't say it was.
> Is this a parody? The chip is a laptop-grade APU tethered to a power bank, and you're bragging about pixel-shading a <1000 tri mesh? Your mind will be blown when you discover what the Nintendo Switch can do with 10w.
OP was talking in the timescale of "since forever", and so am I. Your mind will be blown when you discover what happens when you export that mesh without optimization or LOD maps to a head mounted computer from 2004.
> To do what is in the article, you need a large space and the ability to map into it.
No, while you could do this, the article specifically mentions controller support for moving around. But sure, inside out tracking is not available on all VR headsets.
> The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly out of fusion and have it render without hitting the compute budget limit is amazing and really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
No offense but did you look at what they exported from Fusion? Or the video demo of what they built? The only things that are not blocky are the models downloaded from IKEA. Nothing about this is impressive - AVP can render much better. Even the Meta Quest 3 can render much better.
> Lastly, stitching, the 3-D solution and compositing, and the real world is a very difficult problem.
Yes, but this article makes use of none of it because they are not doing AR.
> No, while you could do this, the article specifically mentions controller support for moving around. But sure, inside out tracking is not available on all VR headsets.
What is in the article is explicitly walking around. Yes, you can do it with controller input.
> No offense but did you look at what they exported from Fusion? Or the video demo of what they built? The only things that are not blocky are the models downloaded from IKEA. Nothing about this is impressive - AVP can render much better. Even the Meta Quest 3 can render much better.
No offense, but mentioning the MQ3 only proves my point. It's amazing how far we've come. Headset mounted compute VR from even 15 years ago would have struggled with this.
> Yes, but this article makes use of none of it because they are not doing AR.
I was just mentioning it. Quote me where I said they were doing that, thanks.
Sorry but we did all that for previs for $big_space_movie. On a shoestring budget in 2011.
> In fact, I don't think there was even a "professional" solution that offered room scale positioning before the vive.
Yeah there was, you mounted some markers on your headset and attached the mocap camera on marker set.
Obviously as a consumer you needed to either use vive or oculus. (and wait for them to come out, but there were other HMDs around. but they were shit and expensive)
> VR headsets require more than double the graphical computation,
I mean yes, but rasterising two cameras isn't usually double the processing. You deffo need to be running at higher framerate all the time though. Otherwise you feel sick (ask me how I know...)
but real talk here, that demo isn't a graphics stress test. its low poly simple lighting and a skybox with a 2048x2048 texture on it. You could probably do that with a mobile phone arkit/core and those shitty little len boxes that came out in 2015.
> but really we haven't had the high speed camera solutions in small packages,
I mean thats not really true. LG made a phone with a 120fps camera in it in 2006. (my timing might be hazy, but its deffo been almost twenty years.) Also the other thing is the cameras don't run at that higher resolution, well not the RGB ones anyway. but thats irrelevant here, as they arent used in this sim.
Also, I don't think the slam on the AVP is running at 90hz, I think a lot of the work is done with sensor fusion, as its way cheaper, faster and accurate. (Again I never took apart the AVP, only oculus. but logically it makes sense as higher frame rates means less usable light, slam is also rather expensive to run.)
> And that doesn't even include transparency and applying real-world attributes of lighting and reflection onto the USDZ file, a a task that's hard to parallelize.
eh? There isn't real world lighting in this. there aren't even any pbfs its just flat textures and ambient lighting. USDZ isn't some magic new world format. its a reasonably nice scene description format.
Transparency is a first class primitive in 3d since for ever. You can even do transparent coloured particles (guess what Gaussian splats are...)
Im not sure what the polygon budget of the AVP is. but the quest 2 topped out at about 1million in unity. I expect the AVP has more, and fancier shader support too.
> Sorry but we did all that for previs for $big_space_movie. On a shoestring budget in 2011.
> Yeah there was, you mounted some markers on your headset and attached the mocap camera on marker set.
You did VR? How did you get the round trip latency below 100ms? That was a serious issue until relatively late in the game. Maybe they cracked it by 2011, but even in 2006, it was a serious issue (mocap rigs are not designed for utra low latency feedback)
One was a vicon, which was low latency and sexy, another was the USB optitrack, which was utter shite. I don't remember what the third lot used.
The vicon at the time seemed to be low enough latency to useable. The director didn't like the headset so opted for a monitor instead. perhaps it was too higher latency to be practical. ( I didn't get a chance to use the headset, being young and too far down the pecking order. I only got to use the monitor )
For those of us who can’t afford a Vision Pro try the Reality Composer app for iOS. You can create a scene and place 3D models on walls or the floor and then navigate in AR.
It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.
Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.
reading some of the comments i was expecting something really high end and polished, but yeah, this is something you could with a headset 1/10th the cost
I was expecting an app that works like the VR version of a laser indoor measuring tool. Where you hold a piece of wooden board and the VR tells you where it should go and then another person wearing a VR helmet attaches it to a post, also at sub-mm precision. Etc.
It would be interesting to see someone apply the principles and techniques of Christopher Alexander to this - trying to "grow" the house virtually and seeing what it might feel like before committing to building it.
Having experienced augmented reality glasses, I have to say that integration with the external world feels much more powerful than the VR experience ever did. AR is exhilerating, while VR is mostly bland and nauseating. I had the experience of interacting with an entity in AR while in the space I was in, it tickles your brain in a way VR somehow can't.
3D walkthroughs are absolutely the OG[1] use for head mounted displays. I had an interesting experience of a realtor who had a couple of Vision pro headsets that they would let you use to tour properties they had for sale. Definitely faster and easier than driving around only to find you could quickly eliminate a choice. I am not sure what sort of workflow they used to capture the 3D space but I do know they had a Mac pro tower dedicated to running it. As another poster pointed out, if your building a house, having all of the wiring/plumbing/etc in '3D space' databases for your house would come in very handy later as you were doing work on the house. I'm cynical though about timeframes and having data and software for such a niche application work for more than 5 years much less the 10 to 20 you might live in a house.
[1] In the early 90's VRML was going to create a Snowcrash style metaverse of 3D places you could visit.
There's no Apple Store in my country, but I travel regularly for work. About a year ago I was in Sydney Australia and took the opportunity to visit one of their Apple Stores to try the Vision Pro.
Having experienced other AR/VR products I was interested to see how Apples general 'refinement' of this product area worked out.
I admit, I had low expectations; and probably for the best, because nothing could've prepared me for what I experienced.
Given this was a gen1 product, I was blown away by how seamless and 'complete' the experience was. There was a few obvious places for refinement like battery-life, weight and the screen. But the immersive experience was incredibly convincing, compelling and even relaxing. The price point clearly needs to come down, and I suspect the technology was a little ahead of its time. But I can see in 5-10 years after continuous iteration and improvement that this product will be something else.
I did something similar in 2020 when we constructed our sauna/guesthouse. Used a program called "LiveHome3D" to build out how what we were looking for, then exported as an OBJ and imported it via Google Poly into "Tilt Brush" on the Oculus Quest.
I also did some light simulations so we could see how the skirting roof around the building would allow light in for summer vs winter.
We have been very happy we used VR. It allowed us to iterate on what felt right, communicate exactly what we wanted to the builder, and the sunlight simulations have allowed it to be comfortably usable year round - letting light in during the winter, but keeping direct light out during the summer.
The coolest use I've seen is a research at the University of Alberta (Canada) that aims to use the Vision Pro to alleviate nystagmus[1].
This is a disease on the muscles that control the eyes' direction. It causes the eyes to twitch involuntarily. They use the Visio Pro to "twitch" the image along with the eye, so the patient doesn't feel the jitter. It enables them to read, watch movies, etc.
Another cool one is to use them to substitute the visual field test machines in ophthalmology offices. These are machines that cost U$15 000.00 dollars.
I did this using the Meta Quest when designing our bathroom. I used Unreal Engine to set up all the materials, lighting, and VR stuff.
It worked great. There's nothing better than walking through a design. It turned out to be the _only_ way I was able to get over my analysis paralysis and actually commit to the project. I took pictures from all angles and printed them for our contractors, and they found it very useful as well.
It's stunning how similar the real pictures are to our renders. Here's an example for those interested: https://imgur.com/a/y3KXphc
I definitely resonate with the "my software-oriented brain feels almost incompatible with this world of designing a home"
I really struggle with visualising what things are going to look like. Even trivial stuff like choosing a colour to paint the wall. Sticking tiny paint swatches or painting sections from sample pots just doesn't work either, it's either all or nothing to me. I don't have that aphantasia thing either, quite a vivid imagination actually, but for stuff like home decor and I'm useless
I'm not really in the market for a vision pro or VR headset so my version of this is to take a picture of a space (say a wall) and feed it into on of the AI image generators with a colour - probably taken from a screenshot of a paint vendor, and tell it to generate me an image of what the wall would look like in <this colour>.
Obviously it's not perfect but it's definitely given me a better idea of what, in the ballpark, something would look like when painted on the whole wall.
I've also had some success with getting it to generate stuff with wall decor on as well, even pasting in product images (e.g. "what would this mirror look like") - even on the "painted" wall.
Vision Pro: when you're done sitting in the dark on your couch looking at photos of the family who left you, you can use AR to remodel your apartment. It even has textures.
The BBC had a programme "Your Home Made Perfect" where they would give people a VR demo of two potential home renovations, then they'd build the one they chose. This was a few years back though, so they're using Oculus Gos [0]
But this use isn't specific to the Vision Pro, or am I wrong? What prevents things like that from running on any other VR headset, like my half-broken Quest 2?
It prompted me to wonder why environments haven't evolved into fully realistic room makeovers yet. As the writer notes, the hardware is ready for more uses.
The Vision Pro is great hardware, waiting for a beyond-toy-app beyond-media-kiosk OS.
I use it as a Mac screen. But why one "screen". Why not all Mac windows. Why not Mac windows that naturally handle 3D content.
I am talking "mundane" but seamless support. The better use of visual space, the better physical ergonomics of screens that can be easily moved, and no barrier to evolving practical uses for 3D, would create the "NeXT" Pro experience over macOS/Mac over time. Instead of another iOS check out counter.
I believe Steve would have seen the beyond Mac potential.
The first version's hardware is still "Pro" enough for a Pro OS.
Just as a screen, switching between a MacBook Pro and Vision Pro is frictionless (aside from a few seconds to link each time). Eye tracking and pinching could be implemented on the Mac, via its camera/island so physical memory translated both ways.
I use mine every day, with just-out-of-reach frustration in direction proportion to real what-I-have-now appreciation.
the irony is that the most practical use case for a ,500 headset is something a 00 Quest does just as well, but you'd never think to try it on the Quest because nobody told you it was a productivity device
Apple doesn’t sell the Vision Pro in Spain yet, so acquiring one would require taking a trip to France.
For Vision Pro owners: is it worth it? Do you use it often? The post does mention a very compelling use case, but it is quite narrow (how often are you remodelling your house?)
It is the greatest piece of technology I have ever owned, and I have a very hard time recommending it anyone.
It's clear that it is the future. But there's still some steps between where Apple is at with it today, and where it needs to be in order to be a mainstream product. I would look and see if you can find one used either in the local market, or via a short trip if possible.
The main problem being that I'm not about to pay the cost of a pretty nice macbook for a vr/ar headset. I'll be interested to see what price the steam frames comes in at.
Favorite tech product I have ever purchased. I use it as my main MacBook display for often 8+ hours per day. As long as you are willing to bump up the font size a bit, the programming experience is fantastic. I use it as a 21:9 display, but it can go up to 32:9. My wife and I watch movies together in the theater environment, and the in-room sharing experience is great. My face and neck were prepared from numerous past headsets, but my wife really hasn't had any comfort issues. Since this is her first headset, I think that just varies by person.
The device is so different for different people. I tried really hard to use my VP as a MacBook display but sitting up in a chair with it on for more than 15 minutes is simply too uncomfortable: too heavy.
I only use it to watch movies, ALWAYS while lying down with my head on a pillow and my feet propped up on cushions. That way I'm able to position the device so as to distribute the weight evenly on my forehead/cheekbones. The revised strap enables the weight to be precisely distributed and altered as needed if it gets uncomfortable.
There are a couple of ways to do it, but I'm not sure which is best.
you can install an app on OSX that allows you to do a passthrough, but the last time I used it horizon was called workrooms.
On windows you can use the official oculus app to use your local gfx card to render graphics. THat gives you really smooth graphics at much better fidelity.
my colleague used vrdesktop to get more screen estate.
For me the screens on the O3 aren't high enough resolution, I can see the gaps between pixels, which means less dense text.
so the screen resolution might be higher, the effective resolution is not so much.
The quest feels sharper for a lot of things. Apart from the rgb camera.
Either way, for me, they are both too lower resolution for useful text work. I can see the pixels and the size of the font I want starts to fall below the effective reolution.
I realise that this is not the case for a lot of people though
So you have two, one for you and one for your wife? What is it like watching a movie next to someone, with both of you wearing headsets?
I would have been much more likely to get one when I was unmarried, but now with a family it greatly reduces my use cases since I don't watch content alone (except when doing the dishes, when I am largely focused on the real world task in front of me).
Yes, my wife took the M2 version when I upgraded to the M5. We find it pretty great, and it really is not much different from having a huge personal theater. The headsets appear to display the content in perfect sync. When sharing content with someone in the same room, it does not render a persona or avatar as it does when using FaceTime (where users appear as floating heads and hands).
As far as I know, she only uses it for movies and YouTube. I have demoed mine a few times, but I honestly do not like doing it much because it feels pretty gross to share something that sits on my face all day.
I bought one and returned it within the 2 week window, well before the last day. I didn't even use it the last weekend I had it, I couldn't be bothered. When I brought it into the Apple Store to return it, the employee who processed the return seemed happy I was returning it rather than getting stuck with it, she didn't pull her punches when talking about it, which I found a bit shocking from an Apple employee. She marked down the reason for return as "not enough content", so I'm assuming that's why most people return it, but that wasn't really my issue.
While the new head strap was better than the original, it still wasn't all that comfortable to wear. Some things were super sharp, while other things always looked blurry. The window system still seemed buggy and I'd describe it as finicky. The battery doesn't last long enough to feel comfortable untethered, while it also gets in the way while being plugged into the wall. It also felt like a lot of work to actively look at what needed focus all the time. It still feels like it should be in beta, maybe even the lab. I'll be willing to try again down the road, but it's hard to tell how much attention Apple is really giving it, as we haven't seen all that much progress in the last couple years.
Not worth it. Get a Meta Quest 3 and can vibe code something similar in a few hours. I recommend WebXR that comes with the built-in browser. Easier to distribute, share, collect feedback and iterate than native. And can use A-Frame: open source framework, very accesible and that I help maintain :)
It’s a cool use case, the same thing is achievable with other VR headsets of course. I imagine you can buy a second hand Quest 2 headset for under 100 euros
I keep on hearing it’s a flop, but where I live, Switzerland, they don’t sell it. So I can’t really say.
And I am not even talking about the badly taken product decisions for such a great headset but… how can they get devs onboarded for an app ecosystem for a device that can only be bought in a handful of countries?
Clearly Apple sold it and did their best so that it fails.
It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units. About 350k of those sold in year 1, about 50k sold in year two, and less than 20K so far in year 3. Workers at Apple's flagship retail stores are saying they haven't sold one in recent memories. The tables displaying them are disappearing from stores. Roadmaps for all future goggles have been shelved. It's a flop and Apple knows it.
> It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units.
I don't know why you would post something that is clearly not true? They released an upgraded version, sporting an M5, October 2025. They do not sell the original M2 version anymore.
Have you gone around and surveyed Apple corporate employees to gather this insight? I’m amazed that your manager didn’t get a call from Apple security, if so.
They weren't handing out dev fused AVPs in sufficient number for anyone to do this when I left. And Apple software developers rarely buy their own hardware, why would you, when you get most of the hardware for free (and dev fused)?
It is true that buying one for use as an extra monitor was pretty niche at Apple Park. And it’s also true that everyone is crammed into shared offices where it would feel anti-social to be wearing one all the time.
So I’m vaguely aligned with you on the utility to the average dev, but your argument for why makes little sense.
FWIW almost none of my direct reports used HomePods, from your list of freely available devices, and grabbing an iPad for anything other than testing was maybe 50/50. And I don’t think you’d claim the iPad isn’t popular.
I have the inverse, not wanting a v2 but a v0.5 that's 80% of the result for 20% of the price! Okay, it's Apple so it'll never be a good price, but conceptually right?
From what I hear, I'd probably be happy with the v1, just not at 3000€ and not when you need to buy a mac in addition to use various features. Depending on what is supported from open OSes (AOSP or Linux desktop/mobile OSes), I could see myself paying 0.5-1.5k to try if it's something for me. Maybe I could get one off the second-hand market if Apple (or a competitor) ends up making a v2 vision device, so I'll join you in hoping for that :)
yeah just anything better than current product will do it for me, i agree you can't expect a full visionos blown hardware probably to fit on regular glasses but a man can wish
Vision Pro is dead. Apple couldn't move 500k units in 2.5 years. The Vision Pro tables are disappearing at Apple Stores. Apple's major web pages no longer advertise it. Executives won't commit to follow-up Vision Pros (or Airs, or any goggles.) Retail staff at flagship stores say they haven't sold one in ages. It's over. Apple's facial computing will move to glasses and enclosed VR goggles are dead. Apple funded and partnered Vision Pro content has slowed to a trickle. eBay prices for nearly new Vision Pros are well under 50% of retail. Supply chain experts have seen zero new component purchases since the original test run maxed at 500k units. It's over. (Same for Quest at Meta.)
I'm really excited to see AR take off in use cases like this, given how useful it would be to give all our technicians e.g. a legacy Google Glass (not the Intelligent Eyewear thing) and direct them to a rack, overlay information about a failed component, and walk them through the repair SOP.
You won't sell a $3.5k headset with a pitch like this where a cardboard phone holder suffices. It was supposed to take 3d videos of your children's first steps while your lenticular eyes stare creepily.
Back a billion years ago a friend of mine tried to start up a company visualizing architectural plans in unreal engine (very early, like maybe unreal 1 or 2 .. he tried it in the quake engine first), years later but still a million years ago while working for a retailer I set up a demo with the early oculus rift dev kits allowing us to visualize new department store 'pad' layouts and new fixture (shelves, seating, racks) designs... using unity (the unreal vr support wasn't in yet).
I imagine at least the architectural stuff just happens now.
We're building a small village of 23 households. During Easter I gave the plan to Opus and asked it to make a threejs rendition. After five or six prompts he really had it down. Then I asked him to add an Easter egg hunting game. Everybody loved it. Last month when I visited the build site it was surreal to visit a video game in real life.
I wish I had a vision pro it would be more awesome. But yes you can quickly create 3d models now from just a drawing. What a time to be alive.
Sounds like the kind of project that would have afforded a Vision Pro, right? I bet you can spot mistakes before building it, that way. Things like, oh, this room will be very dark.
Yes for sure! But we joined when all architecture was already finished, which was many years ago. With a future-neighbour we are looking into porting it all into unreal. Maybe that is just a prompt away but i don't have the time. Though maybe if i spend less time on hackernews I do?
The whole project took 10 years of back-and-forth with local governments and permits. Construction is 9 months. Tragically, all of the original creators left the project because their children had already grown up, or they were growing too old and close to death to invest in something this long term. Mind you this should be the easiest housing project ever; building houses at the edge of a rural village. No wonder house prices in the Netherlands have risen even more than in our neighbouring countries the past 20 years. And just for context, this isn't "lefty-madness". NIMBYism and slow legal frameworks aren't partisan. We've had centre-right-leaning government for 20 years now. This is simply bad government. Or more: Government that prioritizes protecting wealth of the asset-owning class under. If the VisionPro could help with that, that would be a game changer :).
I would put down $3k-$4k for a device that guided me into doing my own renovation/home improvements. Like, I want to take down my cabinets and install a stove vent and then put them up again, or install a solid surface bottom for my shower. Trades people are super expensive right now, and much of the knowledge you could somehow be walked through with AR. Of course there is still dexterity and muscle memory, so maybe it wouldn’t work out well, and then there is heavy lifting.
I forget the name, but there's also a company that does physical mockup of your house's floor plan that you can walk through, kind of like Von Trier's Dogville, but at least with some walls.
There's definitely a perception gap that needs to be closed for these things, whether through VR or something slightly less digital. That's probably also a big part of the appeal of prefabs.
There's also the open source Sweet Home 3D that has tools for making a model from floor plans and includes a lot of furniture. There's even a WebGL version nowadays. Not sure if it has VR support, but it can export the scene to .obj for which there should be plenty of viewers.
Make it recurse for extra coolness - but a model of your house floor plan with yourself standing in it on some furniture surface next to you, that allows you to pick yourself up and place yourself elsewhere. :D
Awesome things..
Also while you are at it- add a Brain Interface reacting to a P300 response with LLM changes to the house depending on what the user looks at :p
folks have been building cars, motorcycles, machine parts, building way before vision pro. outside of tech folks that can diy the pipeline to a large degree, this sounds like a gimmick to extract more money from wealthy folks with some wow factors built-in. not a bad idea for draining money from folks that have it though.
Quest 3 has a 3d explorer (hyperscape) and you can walk around Gordon Ramsay's kitchen.. it was the first "ok, damn" app experience in the quest for me where it felt like you were there.
I can only imagine how powerful that experience would be for experiencing your future house.
Throw in some time-of-day lighting and sun-path illumination... would he great!
Love this. I started doing something similar... back in 2000... in Quake 3. I got off to a good start modeling our future home, but I never got 'round to figuring out how to remove all the terrifying guns and blood-soaked demonic textures.
Should have done it. Should have called it Project Plowshare.
My partner is an architect, and is really good with Unreal for this exact purpose. There's something magical, for a client, about being able to literally walk around the site rendered at Unreal-level fidelity, even if it's not VR.
Disappointingly banal for the field. Spend a couple of minute with your favorite search engine to search for architecture + XR and you will find countless projects, from weekend hackathon prototypes to professional suites to integrations in industrial tools, e.g BIM support, from mobile phone to high end headsets, spanning decades of work.
This is arguably the most banal use of XR, for the Vision Pro or any headset.
It's still cool and useful but if that reaches the top of HR it shows a worrying state of both the platform and the XR industry.
PS: I work in XR and spend time on HN so clearly not the audience.
Yep I even said it's cool but it's a bit like someone being surprised tablets can be used for sketching. If tablets were just released it'd be a nice discovery. If it's years later and there are dozens if not hundreds of sketching solutions to sketch on tablets, it's strange to be surprised by this legitimately cool and precisely popular usage.
What is special about the Vision Pro here? Tons of, as far as I can tell, identical solutions have been around for years for other less expensive devices. Other people in this thread are mentioning them. What's special here except maybe the OP is apple fan
This is very _Huxleyan_. I feel disoriented and nauseous thinking about it, the feeling is stronger when I see the 3D models and the enthusiastic writing. There are all sorts of people in the world... Not for me.
I can’t wait for a future where we go into a showroom, use immersive VR to design the house layout, pick materials in the showroom and have the house show up
a few weeks later as a prefab kit for a local contractor to put together.
Using VR for archviz has been a thing for quite a while, but my friend who works as a (building) architect told me that clients prefer 3d printed scale models, now that 3d printing got cheap and good.
For my part, the make-or-break part of these kind of visualisations -- assisting home renovation, and interior and exterior design and architecture in general -- has been lighting and materials, not [only] or in any meaningful part 3-D through VR augmentation. I mean I would surely appreciate a fine piece of hardware like Vision Pro put to use here, so the author is on point, it's just that at some point you want to actually see the relative colorimetry at work -- how your beige couch is going to look in that spot illuminated by a giant window facing south etc. It's not as critical as making the house right, since moving a couch is easier by far, obviously, but there are things like kitchen islands that are more costly, featuring slabs of stone that is neither cheap nor easy to move.
Anyway, I've been using Radiance to help me deal with the above issues, but it's for all practical purposes non-interactive. At some point there's bound to be a e.g. Monte-Carlo physically-based ray-tracer for these use cases, featuring radiometry with visually negligible error compared to reference (i.e. if you were looking at the real thing with your eyeballs), that is _interactive_-capable (at least in the frames-per-second category and not seconds-per-frame). It's probably already out there, but people have different preferences as to the tools they wish to employ. I like Radiance because it's text mode and gives you a lot of quality for all the text editing and tool composition (which frankly is a bit weird, Greg Ward was sure a maverick!), but mileage varies there.
I think you can get the same experience on much more affordable VR glasses. Also installing an APK is easier than all the Xcode/Apple signing/device pairing etc.
The (many) interior designers we consulted before renovating our house used A/VR to show us what those changes could look like. The AR experience was the most surreal and useful, though.
Thanks for sharing this. The personal observations were far more interesting than another discussion I read about hardware specs. I'd love to read more long-term experiences like this
Watching some of the Lakers courtside games on the Vision Pro was awesome, and I’m not even a Lakers fan. If they rolled that out more broadly it would be a system seller for sports fanatics.
There were full-length NBA Lakers games in the Vision Pro headset earlier this year. I watched a few - super cool. They even had a separate announcer just for the immersive broadcast.
The experience was terrible. IN good VR, you control the POV. Those games just tossed you around to different areas without warning. It would have sucked a lot less if they either kept one view or if they gave us a way to control the view changes. Without those, I'd never watch a season of any league, just too jarring and too inconsiderate of the user. Apple used to do so much better. Now they throw cash at third parties hoping to make something happen and those third party content producers mostly suck.
It is absolutely unreal the experience watching the ~10 minute sports games on the Vision Pro. The thing is 4 grand but that’s how much the first 4K TVs were. Hope the price can drop where this becomes a more widespread experience, I am a virtual daily user of my AVP
Yes, I was hoping they would actually offer some kind of partnership with the sports leagues to stick a few of their cameras in stadiums and offer live sports games, but I don't think there's nearly enough users to support it (at $4k its an insane thing to buy), but honestly I don't even regret it, best gadget I've ever bought. About 80% of my time is spent using Mac Virtual Display, this is so much better than monitors -- I can work literally laying down or in any position, so much more screen real estate, plus it just feels like living in the matrix. But YMMV of course...
But -- you should DEFINITELY book a free demo at an Apple Store, just to see what its like and decide for yourself
This is a killer use case, but you should also take a peek at the Human Factors Handbook -- it's got great information about how to architect buildings like homes that will help you avoid some pitfalls I've seen in custom homes that I've been the second owner of.
You walk down it. Extend your hands, see if they pass through the walls, etc. If you've never used VR before this can be hard to explain with words, but "it's like you're really there" in terms of spacial presence at least. Something about being able to turn your head and have the camera perfectly mirror that movement helps your brain with all sorts of depth cues that are harder to pick up with a flat panel.
> On top of this, the housing market is really expensive right now in many parts of the world (ours definitely included) so making good use of every square foot feels paramount.
I mean, if you already have the land, "the housing market" doesn't really matter. The construction costs are a relatively small % of housing costs in expensive markets; usually the land is the biggest factor.
Plus, when you're building, the cost of each marginal square foot is relatively small.
The most expensive dollar is the one you don't have. Not everyone has a flexible budget.
From my (limited) experience, construction costs can tend to rise with the local real estate market. Those construction workers also have a mortgage or rent that they need to pay every month, and buy goods and services from other people with mortgages or rent to pay.
There was an article shared today about skilled laborers are in very short supply wherever data centers are being constructed, so that may not be a universal truth.
I agree. Despite the housing shortage, no more houses should ever be built. If you're late to the party and don't like getting wet in the rain, I dunno, find a cave or something.
Shame on you for suggesting someone desecrate a cave by using it for shelter. The only acceptable options are $500k houses or refrigerator boxes in the park.
Human experience is a part of conservation. Without a house, these trees would get clear cut once they are big enough to be worth anything. With a house, the homeowner will want to keep them.
(I'd say it would be sweet to plant 2x as many trees as are cut! Especially if one has the expertise to pull that off in a meaningful way... lotta big companies ran into trouble trying to do similar in carbon credit scheme contexts.)
Also if the land's protected then you're right. In California, from Muir Woods to Big Sur, more segments would be countless mansions instead of redwoods w/o hard-fought battles & generous philanthropy. But not sure we're given enough data to sideeye Christian (post author and UX extraordinaire).
Humans destroy to create shelter; this can be done responsibly, meeting the Earth & Maslow's needs.
As cool as it is, I do wonder how much life is left in the Vision Pro, it's clearly failed massively. I know they didnt expect to sell loads, but they're still sitting on stock made when it first came out, and seemingly have no plans to do any major updates.
My team uses this technology on a daily basis at my company. I run a design / build firm in the Hamptons, USA. We start all of our design projects with a 3d-first approach. Schematic design starts in 3D using Rhino3D or Revit. We use visualization plugins, like Enscape, to render the models and stream to a Quest 3 headset.
So when clients come in, and feels adventurous, we'll setup the headset, set the display height to their actual, and let them walk around their beautiful new home.
The response has been powerful. My clients are able to truly understand the scale, the proportion of rooms, ceiling heights, and the smallest details.
We're able to make real-time changes to the model (within reason) and provide instant design feedback.
I've been using this technology for years and I'm surprised it's not being adopted faster - good for us right now though!
This comment almost made me quit my job and pursue my original passion in architecture. So the job was, all along, as fun as I imagined it… And the full-stack knowledge to make it happen is still rare? I am currently designing my house in Blender and was planning to import it into Unreal Engine to make it navigable. HN has a way of serving me the content I’m looking for at the right time…
I love hearing statements like this.
I want to learn how to import into Unreal Engine... also throw a rocket launcher in there with some destruction physics.
I will caution tho, converting the Rhino models back into CAD for construction drawings, etc. is time consuming. One of my architects is skilled in Revit, but we haven't explored the real time rendering / 3d visualization abilities enough with it.
>I want to learn how to import into Unreal Engine... also throw a rocket launcher in there with some destruction physics.
When they bail ?
Start with a parametric program like solid works
Revit is parametric, but something like Rhino (going off reputation, never used it myself) gives you more free-form modeling control.
It’s like starting with a pencil sketch instead of going straight to SolidWorks, once you start building that more nailed down drawing with its explicit flow of sketches and operations in relationship to each other, it becomes much harder to make large structural changes.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-71F2C...
Rhino + Grasshopper is the gold standard for all the curvy geometry in anything resembling Zaha Hadid’s work. It is also parametric. There’s even a plug-in to use it inside Revit. Solidworks is great for designing the chassis, but the body was probably sketched in Rhino or Maya.
> pursue my original passion in architecture
Do it! You have the knowledge, you have the interest, you now have confirmation someone else was able to do it, so can you! No time to wait, just jump in and start planning, then execute! I don't know why people hesitate so much, you do literally only live once, and who has time to sit around thinking "what if?" when we're old and just want to chill? Worst case scenario, you fail, learned a bunch, lean back on what supported you before, maybe in a slightly different way, but with so many more fun memories.
> I don't know why people hesitate so much
Money? It's hard to stop getting revenue suddenly for an undetermined time. Especially with a family behind.
> Worst case scenario, you fail, learned a bunch, lean back on what supported you before
That's to my opinion very simplistic very often not true and dependent on the job market (which isn't that great right now!)
They're a developer, money is probably a pretty weak excuse.
True, the job market is worse than it's been before, but it'll also eventually get better, as before. Things go up and down, can't really skip out on your dreams just because it's a bit difficult, then you're just giving up as easily as everyone else. Gotta fight a little :)
You might want to look at these videos with regards to using archviz in Unreal Engine with a photogrammetry visual set. BIM output can be used if you have more experience with architectural CAD toolsets. The plugins are available now except the BIM which is slated to be open by the end of August/Summer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiiKeAlm6Ow This Put Me on Stage at Unreal Fest Chicago
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ehoHM-uzRQ From Scan to Stream: Open Pipelines for Large-Scale 3D in Unreal Engine
Blender has a wasd controller walk mode. Shortcut is shift + backtick
Uhh, I have a laptop near me where I was planning to throw my drawing to get a 3D model in blender. I have no experience with blender, but I have a dwg file architect gave me (for a house where I already live in) and I was ready to make AI do the rest. I want to make some reconstruction, plan to buy/calculate stuff I need for the walls/floor, etc and just a fun project to visualize my home.
Anyways, I learned that AI can't read DWG, so converted it to DXF using trial AutoCAD. The LibreCAD couldn't even open my dwg as it was some newer version.
I also have a plan to make some "what-if" scenarios - we want to remodel kitchen, remove this wall, put this here and there... basically that can help visualize and that can understand how big stuff is to calculate BOM and such.
Is Blender OK for it or should I target some SketchUp for my "3D feel"? I'm looking forward to using some free tools.
Is there even a free cad alternative that would understand "newer" dwg file formats? Is there other software than AutoCAD with MCP capability that would allow navigate dwg/dxf?
None of it is very good yet. It’s got a long way to go.
Freebird XR is available in blender plugins for VR display
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For those that don’t know, the Hamptons are full of very nice places. The uber-rich have second homes, there, that are bigger than Gold Coast first homes.
This company probably makes a lot of money, but they also have serious competition, so they need things like the 3D walkthroughs.
Summer traffic in the Hamptons is a nightmare, though. Many uber-rich have helipads.
You are 100% correct. My company is fortunate enough to have the working capital and time to explore ideas, which is honestly, one of the most fulfilling parts of my business.
And the Hamptons competition is very serious. It's insane really. Construction in the Hamptons is the Olympics of high-end building. There are atleast a dozen excellent, amazing builders and over 250 active companies in total. My company sits near the top of that list and the only one, to my knowledge, actively leveraging technology to our advantage.
No private heli-pads, they banned it long ago. There's a little known heli-pad on Meadow Lane in Southampton. So from your SoHo office to your beachfront house is under an hour. There's also Blade service to EH.
One of my clients often arrives by seaplane to check on the progress of his Peconic Bay waterfront project. It's pretty cool.
Ah. Glad to hear they banned them. I guess even the snobs got tired of having their teeth rattling out of their heads.
Glad to hear you guys are doing so well.
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I did this circa 2021 (with SketchUp, Enscape, Quest 2) during our house remodel. It was very successful in reducing the number of walls my wife wanted to move around after they had been finished
Me and my partner did this as well, only using a HTC Vive. We modeled our bathroom in two different versions and could toggle between the two while "standing inside" the bathroom. The VR simulation was the deciding factor between the two layouts, as one just "felt" better in person.
Do you recommend an application in particular to make it easy to do something like that (record a video walk through that you turn into a rendering on a PC in VR)? I happen to have a Valve Index with dust on it.
And I mean for someone with no specialized architect/design skills.
Speaking of which, it seems like evolution in the headset world is slow or stalled at least commercially.
Reducing?
My house has definitely been opened up over time since I bought it. Not really the upstairs but the ground floor is much more open and lighter. In fact, it's where I mostly do stuff on a laptop in spite of having a full-fledged office upstairs.
Virtual visit, get feel for house layout, get walls moved on the plans before building, less walls to be moved after building.
I think parent comment was surprised that there was _any_ moving of walls after the fact, which "reducing" implies..
Never get married, man...
There is a continual stream of TV programs about housing which tell you every problem can be solved by knocking a wall down, building an extension, installing bi-fold doors or a granite worktop.
If your partner watches this stuff then you are in trouble.
Heh. Like 10 years ago I was designing retail stores for a company expanding their franchises. Each location had to be a bit different, depending on the quirks of the building they were leasing. I was doing the 3D layouts of the interiors, so I built a webvr app to let them jump through the renderings (not a walk-around; it mapped out a bunch of different fully raytraced stereoscopic skyboxes from different positions that you could navigate between). We used to send out an oculus rift to the new franchisees while they were in the build phase so they could check out the renderings and request changes as we were finalizing it.
Do you find the value of VR/AR to be in the communication of design intent to clients unfamiliar with traditional 2D representations, or do your designers leverage VR/AR during the design development process as well?
Absolutely both. Internally, we'll model something, move an element, etc., and we're able to evaluate the idea until it feels right.
For clients, I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation does nothing for them. They will nod, make comments, and play along, but until you sketch a person into the drawing, they don't even understand that the front door is ten feet tall.
"I don't know any other way at this point. Showing a novice a 2D elevation"
I think 2D prints aren't the baseline, and since at least the late 2000s even run of the mill architecture firms have been using 3d studio-type renderings with clients. Maybe I don't understand how the visionpro works. Your clients arent actually physically moving their body, right? What's the advantage of looking around the space in a visionpro vs large monitor?
I’ve been through this (but with different software than the author used). The level of immersion, the sense of being there, is dramatically better with the Vision Pro.
It was the biggest unlock when it came to choosing a staircase design. Hard to picture ahead of time and expensive to change later.
I worked with DUS Architects in Amsterdam on a staircase designer / visualizer for their enormous fused deposition modelling (FDM) 3D house printers, using Rhino + Grasshopper + Unity3D.
"Complexity is free when you are drawing with a nozzle."
One thing about their use of plant-based bioplastic is that if you didn't like your staircase or house after printing it, you could shred it, melt it back down, redesign it, and print out a different one again.
>On a plot in Amsterdam-Noord, DUS Architects turned a six-metre FDM printer called the KamerMaker into a research laboratory disguised as a house — extruding honeycomb rooms from plant-based bioplastic to ask whether a building can be downloaded, printed on site, and shredded back into feedstock when it is done.
https://houseofdus.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20180509103603/http://3dprintcan...
https://www.studiomatrx.org/guides/3d-print-canal-house
>The KamerMaker: a desktop printer, grown enormous
>The instrument at the centre of the project is a machine called the KamerMaker — Dutch for "room maker" — installed on the site from September 2012. Conceptually it is disarmingly simple: it is a fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer, the same layer-by-layer, melt-and-extrude technology found in a hobbyist desktop machine, scaled up until it stands roughly six metres tall inside a movable, container-sized pavilion. It was developed by DUS in dialogue with the desktop-printing world — the Ultimaker community was part of that lineage — and it can print single elements up to about 2.2 × 2.2 × 3.5 metres.
Much earlier (1997-2000) I worked on The Sims architectural editing tools for walls, floors, windows, doors, swimming pools, ladders, diving boards, object placement, etc, including the staircase placement tool, which was extra tricky because it spanned two stories, punched holes in the floor, and reserved two contiguous floor landing tiles upstairs and downstairs. Orchestrating the undo/redo edit records in the right order was diabolical. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
The Anti-Heisenberg Teleporter added by House Party was not actually classified as a staircase although it spanned two floors and had landing tiles. But it worked since the staircase tool (and other specialized tools like windows, doors, pool ladders and diving boards, etc) were actually just special modes of the generic universal object placement tool.
Stairs Aesthetics In Every Sims - Sims 1, Sims 2, Sims 3, Sims 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43IwecyTHYU
The modular clown themed roller coaster construction kit in Makin' Magic was amazing!
The Sims 1 Was Made in 2000...and it's still amazing:
https://youtu.be/x00rH9eIJgo?t=216
LGR - The Sims 1 & 2 Legacy Collection Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUDt4BoMg-s
I'm amazed hearing about how your skills and knowledge extend to multiple disciplines. First time I've heard of DUS Architects - this is real modern architecture, sitting the crossroads of art and science. Very cool.
> What's the advantage of looking around the space in a visionpro vs large monitor?
A lot of people don't grasp scale correctly when looking at a monitor. It's not an intrinsic skill in the same way that our perception of being inside a 3D space is
Really? Who? I've worked with two dozen AD100 Architecture firms. Most will farm out a couple static renders that will never again be updated throughout the evolution of the project.
Yes, they can move around if they want. We set a boundary in the foyer of my office, so they have about 15 feet of movement.
If you haven't ever put on a 3D headset, it's hard to describe the advantage. Do I think it's 100% necessary vs. just looking at a screen, no, but it's cool.
Yeah sorry I was mistakenly thinking about non-interactive 3D walkthroughs. But still, that would be better than prints as a point of comparison.
Are there any productive tools or workflows you employ for modeling directly in VR? Or is it more useful for review and evaluation of models developed on traditional workstations?
I'm AEC adjacent and am trying to talk myself into picking up a pair strictly for personal architectural projects..
We really only use it for architectural intent. There is a dream that is BIM on residential projects, but unless the project has an extreme level of technical constrains, it's often cost prohibitive to model EVERYTHING. I'm really hoping that AI assisted design tools will bridge the gap. Imagine uploading architectural and structural drawings and AI correctly modeling HVAC duct size, mechanical room requirements for pumps, boilers, etc., modeling electrical chases, vent pipes, exhaust ducts, ERVs, etc., in a local code compliant manner. I know it's coming and I can't freaking wait.
We have on occasion used our Matterport 3 lidar scanner to model existing structural conditions to help us figure out a problem.
Re Matterport 3 - we use it as a communication tool for remote work sessions with engineers, architects, clients, etc. Saves everyone a trip to the site. Helps us document progress, preserve historical details, uncover discrepancies between field and plan, etc.
I am working on this at bear.build. It's early, but I would love to get your feedback if you have some time. justin@bear.build
We tried using this software - https://www.prevu3d.com/digital-twin-use-cases/design-engine...
It looks cool, but it wasn't applicable for our day-to-day.
Wow I’m incredibly impressed that you’ve decided to embrace VR technology. When renovating our house, it was incredibly hard (and still is) to visualize how everything. So far we just got lucky but the basement is going to be a challenge as we’re making structural adjustments.
How did you get your team to get onboard with the process? How is the ROI?
My team design team are graduate architects, on the younger-ish side - 29 and 40. One worked for Santiago Calatrava - who, if you know, obviously models all his work. So it was second nature to them, I just pushed them to lean into it. Rhino is not without its drawbacks. It is time consuming but it's worth it because, as a sales tool, it wins every time. I'll have first time meetings with perspective clients where we'll wireframe a design on their survey (if we know some particulars of the program). Blows people away.
The ROI - the salaries were a negative on the books for two years, but now we're choosing our projects, ones that any AD100 firm would kill for.
Not vr/ar but 3d visualisations and walkthroughs were a thing like 20 years ago. I did try to leverage it with the clients but what happened was that once people could see everything they had more opinions about how to change it. It helped me to get clients though. Sometimes it would go on for quite a ”few” iterations. I think it is more scalable not to do it, i.e. not to be on the cutting edge, unless the customer pays premium for it. I am pretty sure vr/ar has the same challenges where people are like “oh I thought the ceiling was higher, can we increase it by 2 inches and move the stair case a bit?” then you do it and something is wrong again.
I'd see that as evidence that the visualization is doing its job. It's much cheaper to discover "I wish the ceiling were 2" higher" before anyone starts building than after. The challenge is reducing the cost of each iteration. That's where newer tooling starts to matter.
I really hope that one day I am so incredibly rich that I can hire a team like yours. It would be amazing to have a professional firm design a house for you. I’m guessing you have to be in the 1% for that.
This comment got me curious, as it felt attainable/more commonplace to me. I did some searching, and according to gov.uk stats 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes. That is actually surprisingly high!
Impressive. Where I live you get a flat assigned and you put your old furniture in. Maybe you paint the walls, but they have to be white when you move out.
If you are doing well for yourself you buy a house from a project. It will be 150 identical homes next to each other. If you pay extra you get to decide the color of the kitchen and what tiles you want in the pre-designed bathroom.
Designing your own home is some Jeff Bezos stuff.
It's quite common in the USA ... but since we have massive sprawl they will build whole neighborhoods at once, give you a choice of 5-10 different model homes and then you can customize on top of that. Sometimes a customization can be a whole floor.
If the builder does it correctly you really have to squint to tell which homes are the exact same since they are all slightly different.
> 7-10% of homes in UK are custom/self-build homes
Worth to note that there is a huge practical difference between a "custom" and a "self-build" home.
- On "self-build" you take full personal responsibility for finding land, securing planning permission, managing the budget, and hiring architects or builders.
- On "custom" you buy from a developer who already has pre-approved planning permissions, often for a huge serviced plot targeting 20-30 homes based on some copy/paste concept, managing all aspects of the construction while you can influence minor aspects of the layout, style, and interior finishes.
Custom-built homes are very common in rest of Europe. It's a common scheme to buy a plot of land, plan a low-cost project of very densely placed, similar looking houses, reusing as many elements as possible to simplify permissions, and then allowing customers to pay for additions within those fixed boundaries.
The possible individual modifications are usually minor then, everything that requires re-submission for (structural/council/...) approval is not economic.
Then there's the "I self-build, my dad is a carpenter and I just bought this toolbox" category, which is such a minefield of fatal mistakes that movies and reality shows were made around it.
I think the market for "self-build but fully outsourced to a premium developer" is the ~1-2% bracket only...
Toolbox minefield made me laugh.
I guess I'm in the .001%: my father in law built homes for a living and built his own home and every piece of furniture in it himself. Everything lasts longer and works better than in professionally built homes in my experience. He's a real marvel.
I suspect there may not many more people with his skillset after his generation passes.
Agreed, and from the people I know who fully self-build say they will never do it again. The amount of decisions and time it takes can be very stressful.
But when you go to very high end neighborhoods where you essentially pick a plot and a architect, no 2 homes are close to the same, all completely custom.
I would bet a lot of those are still not being designed by a team that is working for you specifically. It's also important that if the statistic is 7-10% of homes, that's very different from 7-10% of people living in such homes.
In the UK market architects are kinda common.
For a lot of building projects you need both pictures to send the government to get permission before you break ground; and also evidence of the structural calculations, and that the structural elements were built to design.
You can do these things without an architect, but there's enough demand to support an ecosystem of small businesses (say, 1 architect and 2 support staff). Not every project/architect uses a full 3D model - some architects produce a set of 2D drawings.
I would guess the majority is catalog houses.
not really when less than 70% people own their home
You're posting on a tech forum that includes readers from the highest income sector of the economy.
There are a lot of 1 percenters here.
Can you please do a separate post about your job? The technology sounds amazing and I'd love to know how AI is now interacting with this stack. Also, which firm? Might need a design soon!
Wait, you actually have an empty building/area the size of a typical custom design home? Aren't those typically rather huge? Do you partition the previews?
The Quest has joysticks to control your position. We managed to get one of our 70 year old clients to figure it out.
Okay I have to ask - do the joysticks move you forward like they typically would for a character in a video game? Or do you use teleport controls? Because the former would absolutely make me (and I think most people?) motion sick
It's as good as any VR FPS game.
Why would you assume they physically walk around the entire space instead of teleporting/moving in VR?
> Do you partition the previews?
It's the Hamptons, these houses are for some of the wealthiest people on the planet.
I'd make them wear a giant visor over their face rather than have to talk to them directly too. They're also some of the most insufferable people you'll ever meet.
This is wonderful and amazing, but isn't there a risk to over promise? Reality can never be as perfect as a 3D rendering...?
But reality is never as perfect as the design. It seems to me that being able to "stand" in a rendering and look around is going to put you much closer to reality than looking at blueprints and a front elevation. So i don't think the question is "could VR and the end product be different" it is "is VR closer to the end product than other options" and I think the answer is likely, yes.
Hey mate, I'm a builder in Sydney, Australia and I'm currently trying to implement something very similar in my business. I'd love to connect and have a chat about the ins and outs if you'd be open to it? If you could reach out that would be awesome. My email is in my bio. Or reply to this comment if you need another form of contact.
Do you believe Apple will continue to spend billions on a device that caters to niche enterprise use cases and is today selling in single digit thousands per month, if that? If so, qhat other Apple products out there suggest that enterprise is something Apple cares about enough to maintain a distinct product line? This isn't Mac Pro where 95% of the R&D and production costs are shared with half a dozen other major Mac SKUs. This isn't MacOS. It isn't iOS. It isnt even iPad OS which it was initially based on. Excepting the SoC, the hardware is entirely bespoke. It doesn't seem realistic to me that they'd continue it without a real consumer audience that the last 2.5 years proved does not exist. Hell, even the lowly Quest, that cost Meta over $100B so far, sold nearly 30M units and Meta's clearly bailing on that as it pivots to non-enclosed facial computers like glasses. The whole category is a failure outside of a few enterprise cases.
The comment your replying to used Quest 3. No need for Apple. Steam Frame will probably have a color camera module too and be even more flexible as a real computer.
MacBook Neo is a clear business win. Cheap, available, consistent, works with standard Jamf MDM, and trivial warranty repairs/replacemnts.
Most small to medium enterprises run off SaaS. The most common local tool is Office suite, which now has feature parity with the Windows version.
OK, go off.
Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/
Just like the article says: Within a second after putting on the headset you just know if things are proportioned right, or need some fine tuning. That's really valuable!
Also, when the house was actually (partially) built, it felt exactly like the simulations we knew pretty well by that point.
> Yeah, we did the same thing when designing our house almost ten years ago now, using a HTC Vive running https://irisvr.com/prospect/
Coincidentally enough, author of the submission ended up calling their thing "Prospector"
> After some intense typing with a combination of Claude and Codex over the course of a morning I had something I was pretty happy with. I named it Prospector (can’t remember why) and I’ve been really happy with it.
I can't help but think that the author asked the LLM for suggestions on the name, and Prospector/Prospect was recommended as it was so similar to an existing thing, but I might be reading too much into it.
The fact he even said "can't remember why" makes me think he's fully aware and it's a joke
Prospector could even be interpreted/spelled as Prospecter, -er as in "more/better than Prospect"
Leveling this up: Calculate sun angles at different times of the year to simulate light entering the house. Find out if some room is going to be unbearably hot in the summer because it's got too much full sunlight; make sure there are windows that can take maximum advantage of sunlight in the winter months; maximize opportunities to accidentally catch the sunset / sunrise.
I did this. Less so for the sun light entering the windows (albeit a great idea), but more so for making sure I'd see the sunsets. There are great websites that will let you see the sunrise and sunset directions for any given day of the year.
Awnings are your friend, particularly on windows facing the equator. It's not very difficult to calculate all the ways sun will hit a window throughout the year and design an awning to block the sun in the summer but not the winter.
We use it all the time for light studies. LAT / LONG inputs in Enscape. I've actually compared models to actual days and it's pretty f'n spot on.
This is so awesome. I wish more realistic problems get solved like this instead of every new gadget getting shoehorned for gaming or porn.
I feel like at this point you should just hire an architect.
1000%. If you have the luxury/curse of _building_ the house on empty land simulating light is extremely important imo. It determines everything from layout of rooms to window placement to furnishing etc. (You probably don’t want eg sun behind TV). Even ants orient their dwellings with respect to sunlight.
Maybe integrate with Stellarium to use as a sky box and lighting.
Christian is a brilliant developer, that made simply the best experience for reddit that ever existed; after the ban, and when Apollo was dead, I simply stopped consuming reddit (other than an occasional kagi search that takes me there).
I hope he knows that a lot of iOS users really appreciate his work, (I even convinced one hardcore Android user to get an iPhone just for this one app, it was that good).
For that, thank you Christian!
Like many others, I said I’d quit Reddit when they killed Apollo. I was skeptical that I’d actually follow through, but it didn’t end up being a sacrifice at all. The official app sucks so hard it isn’t fun to browse, and now that the mobile site forces you to download the app, I don’t even look at posts from search results much anymore.
The official app is so bad that basically all quality posters left, along with practically all decent moderators except power-tripping assholes who are happy as long as they have a ban button.
Reddit's post quality dropped so hard after they killed off the API. It's night and day.
then you got companies astroturfing their own subreddits cough /r/snowflake pumping their own fake comments about using whatever AI nonsense they have and relentlessly downvote anything questioning if the content in the sub is even real lmao. this thread had me in tears https://www.reddit.com/r/snowflake/comments/1uoioz6/coco_gui... the mod of that sub de-modded the snowflake employees and there's a sticky now talking about what to do about snowflake fake engagement. lmao that subreddit is a prime example of how the utility of subreddits has pretty much evaporated
it's so funny how corporations throw literally everything they have to control narratives and it just drives people away. all companies tried so hard to have a twitter presence and that site is now nothing but a wasteland of sports journalism and racist bots.
but yeah, reddit sucks. it can't decide what it wants to be but it sure is barreling towards yet another crappy scrolly social media platform
My use of Reddit also drastically reduced after Apollo stopped working (I didn’t follow the instructions that many others have been to sideload the app, configure with an API token, etc.).
But I found a couple of ways to browse without using the official app. One is Safari, with the free SinkIt for Reddit extension, and another is a free app called Lurker. The Lurker app is nowhere close to the speed and smoothness of Apollo. It also seems to drain the battery quicker, but the UI is relatively clean.
I don't have the app and I use reddit (although not often) via my mobile browser (firefox) and it never forced me to download the app, as far as I recall.
Old reddit still works, images and videos are usually forced to go to new reddit. You can sometimes get around it by clicking on the comments link.
I started getting a blocking overlay telling me to download the app on new reddit and I just leave.
I encountered that blocker today, so I decided to try Safari's Hide Distracting Items (1) feature, which blocked it once and for all, which I was pretty impressed by.
(1): https://support.apple.com/en-us/120682
> Old reddit still works, images and videos are usually forced to go to new reddit.
By default it sends you to new ("www"), but I've found (at least on non-mobile) I can edit the URL to use "old" and works (at least for now).
It does it occasionally to me (Safari on iOS). When it happens, I just close the page. I hope this is enough of a signal to make someone think.
I land on Reddit every couple of days or so, and if they don’t kick me I read the thread and sometimes browse a bit a couple of subreddits I used to participate in.
Another Firefox for Android user here. I get popups nudging me to install their app all the time.
I use Reddit through Eddrit and Reddlib front ends. I never use the official Reddit front ends unless I land into them by mistake.
I never use the app, only the website. I don’t know what you’re talking about?
They’re rolling out the experiment flag I’m guessing. I get walled too.
Yeah my phone was doing that for a while. I just took it as a sign that maybe I should spend less time on Reddit. After a while it stopped gating me. Not sure if that was a measured decision on their end, or just that the experiment ended.
Bars! My friends and I constantly talk about how good Apollo was. I've tried side loading with alt store as well, but I can't seem to keep it stable, it crashes, fails, etc.
All the best to him on his future endeavors!
I’ve said it in a few other places here before, but axing Apollo is the reason I’m on HN at all.
I used to use Reddit daily to follow a few games and news subs, and was fairly active in a couple of those communities as a contributor.
But I don’t know that I miss Reddit all that much, save for a few small corners of the community. The discourse here is a lot more thoughtful, generally, and the community aspect is what I enjoy the most.
Christian’s work on Apollo made me hopeful that good app devs will continue to exist (shoutout to HACK for iOS, it’s a great HN reader), and I’m glad he seems to be doing something pretty cool with his time
You can use Apollo reborn still with your own API keys. I personally use a modded reddit app on Android or old.reddit in Firefox. Reddit is way too valuable to stop using entirely. I also use it in LLMs asking them to reference reddit if I am looking for specific suggestions.
Thankful for its spiritual success, Voyager for Lemmy.
The new reddit, the not old.reddit, is hideous and offensive, and it's hard to believe they didn't acquire Apollo.
Good for me though, no more reddit.
Apollo was for users, reddit main purpose isn't for the user anymore. How would they get rid of r/all with all the 3rd party clients around? Much harder when you don't control the full experience.
I have 2 subreddits I still look at, and I can only bear to use old.reddit, new.* is such a hot mess. I should just leave reddit entirely, but /r/localllama does surface some stuff early that takes quite a while to make it here and other tech hubs.
> I should just leave reddit entirely, but /r/localllama does surface some stuff early that takes quite a while to make it here and other tech hubs.
I do that every now and then but LocalLlama has become such a pain to read. Between the stupid memes, the useless benchmarks and the hype train of the week, I feel the signal to noise ratio has dropped significantly. I haven’t really found anything like what it was 1 or 2 years ago.
Reddit had already acquired AlienBlue which was kinda the go-to iOS reddit app back in the day and I believe it's still the base for the official app.
Yep, me, too. My reddit usage went down 10x (maybe more) after Apollo was killed. Probably a good thing, in retrospect.
I also quit once Apollo was done in. Thankful to him for improving the Reddit experience, and for helping me leave completely.
I recommend protego https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/protego-for-reddit/id673795972...
Man the reddit apps sucks
That name sounded familiar! Those were the days.
Apollo was the best iOS app there was.
Similar story here. Great software
The best part about Kagi is you can set it to redirect reddit links to old.reddit.com to avoid the enshittification
That's neat. Once it is built, I think a cooler use is to trace wiring and plumbing through your walls of your existing house. Your revit model may include all of this data, or at least the plan. Things change. :)
Though this is especially helpful for old homes where you have to sort of improvise ethernet wiring.
I normally just use it to consume 4k hdr media though.
It has not lived up to being a utility player device, but so far it is so good at media delivery that is sort of okay.
Good time to mention TwinMotion - a real-time archviz software from Epic, built on top of Unreal Engine. Free for personal and small-scale commercial use.
https://www.twinmotion.com/
Basically, you do the geometry modelling in Sketchup, Blender or what have you, import that into TM, texture it, place lights and then walk around Doom style. VR headsets are supported natively. There is also a decent (and very easy to use) support for "scenarios", so you can open/close doors, turn on/off lights, etc.
Highly recommended.
PS. There is a free desktop version of Sketchup Make 2017. Got everything one needs for a single-person setup. There is a copy on the Internet Archive.
Here's a low-voltage wiring installer that wrote his own Vision Pro app to help visualize in-wall studs to make it easer to run wiring:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1ut1atj/how_i_ret...
https://old.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1tq34lj/created_...
Submitted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48867417
I hired him last year to run Ethernet cable in my existing house and he did a great job (the original homebuilder did not make it easy on him!) At the time he was placing random icons so they'd protrude onto the next floor. I guess he got some development done to use color-coded bars instead, and it's much better looking/accurate.
He's in the Charlotte NC area.
I scanned my local climbing gym and have climbing videos mapped onto the wall
https://kmcheung12.github.io/climb-preview/w/a6ece004
I think 3D application is massively under utilised. There is whole family of interaction the textual web cannot provide
This is amazing! I'm guessing this can be used for creating 3D models of outdoor routes if you wore a vision pro on rappel? How accurate do you think it would be for "seeing into" cracks, at least deep enough to pick up the relevant details for gear placements and climbing movements?
Accurate reconstruction is entirely up to the camera's ability to orbit around the object. If we are talking about cracks, the visual signal will be very poor as we can't wiggle a camera inside a crack.
On the other hand, if we want a 3D reconstruction of a route in general, using a drone, then that's very doable. We still rely on 2D climbing magazine/book/app to view a route, where the contour of the route itself is highly desirably imo.
I agree it is under utilized but genuinely question if it provides sufficient value to warrant increased utilization.
[dead]
There are apps for displaying RevIt models on the Apple Vision Pro, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, iPhone ARKit, and Android AR [1], so if you are working with an architect it is worth asking them if they can provide in-progress models as you iterate to avoid having to reproduce them yourself.
[1] https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdc...
It seems like everything here can also be done with any iPhone using ARKit. Obviously the headset is better, but not $3500 better than just looking through your phone.
Just thought I’d raise this since it weirdly isn’t mentioned in the article.
I used a similar technique the last time I moved - scan the apartment using the iPhone, then I had a 3D model for measuring and planning out the space before/during the move. It’s a big help when planning out furniture etc.
And I scanned my old place before leaving so I can virtually step into it any time I want. iPhone via finder/preview handles showing 3D models in AR out of the box.
Ive used various AR apps to see how products fit in physical spaces--like Ikea used to offer. I've also worked on VR projects for car interiors. With VR you really do get a sense of scale and space that you're still guessing at with AR on a phone. I really liked when people removed the VR headset they were surprised to be back in a small room.
Like you mentioned, Ive wanted to scan some spaces to remember them in the future. Last time I looked, those apps werent very easy to find or easy to use.
I used Polycam. It was very easy to use, but imperfect. But it got the job done very quickly.
It can generate a mesh, or convert the scan into a floor plan or idealized 3d model.
I was able to capture the mesh and save to my iPhone. I think I did a month subscription and that was more than enough time.
How did you actually end up doing it, like the full pipeline ? For example what app did you use to scan your apartment and orocesss it into a 3d model (which kind?) and then how do you actually do the planning (like which tools/software to plan your new space?)
And I ask for details because I have attempted something similar but wasn’t getting the best results. I was using ‘3d scanner app’ (which was good but was sold and is not recommended now), and that created pretty decent models, but like, they were still I think based on lidar and not super precise. I also wasn’t sure how to reconcile my actual floor plan with that 3d model the right way - like if the 3d model got some error built-up, the wall which I know to be 100 inches has to be that, and not 101 or 99, since for furniture planing an inch definitely matters. So I kind of got stuck here on how to actually generate some useful and as correct dimensionally as possible 3d model, into which I can later put furniture 3d models into. Thanks for any info!
I used Polycam. I’m not sure if it’s 100% accurate down to the inch - probably not but it was quite close. They have a floor plan editor now but I haven’t tried it.
As for planning the new space, I sketched it out - I might have used their tools, might have also just sketched it out on paper.
Once I had my plan, I marked it out using masking tape just to sanity check and everything fit as expected.
Thanks, I’ll try Polycam too.
Looking through your phone at an AR object is not anywhere close to what VR offers. Maybe with a Google Cardboard / Google Daydream type experience. But not holding the phone out in front of you.
Obviously $3500 is not nothing for most people, but neither is building a house in this economy. I think the skillset of leveraging the provided code here and working with 3D models is gonna be a bigger barrier to entry than the cost of a Vision Pro.
If you're using it for hobby projects and you're budget constrained yeah.
If you're making a sales pitch the $3500 is an investment in raising sales.
Arkit is the first thing i thought of and has way way more of an adressable market.
Or a used meta quest 2 which is like $100.
Maybe not $3500 better, but likely $300 better (price of a Quest).
This is an absolutely standard feature of any VR headset that has ever been released in the history of VR headsets. Make a 3D world, walk through it. What am I missing?
You’re missing the difference between a feature and an application of that feature.
The most incredible tech on the planet is just a useless, Rube Goldberg machine without an application for the tech.
VR has lots of uses, but it takes someone outside the field who wouldn’t have given it a go otherwise to see another use and go “hey guys, you can do THIS too!”
These apps already exist in VR. There's even a few of them on the Meta Quest line of headsets which are also standalone. The issue is that most people, who are older than Gen Alpha, flat out refuse to use VR for various reasons so they're not going to be aware of any of this. It's just dismissed.
I think you deeply underestimate the value of good advertising and the charisma of the ones doing it - especially when they're sharing their story more than trying to sell you something.
I think you missed the fact that not even Apple could change the mindset of adults regarding VR.
I am referencing trends and past data, while you’re talking about an anecdote.
10 years ago I was doing walk-throughs of a 10 year old Sketchup model I made of my home -- using Oculus Rift. There's nothing special here.
Yep, we did hackathons with old Oculus Rift DK1 around this concept over 15 years ago or so.
That's awesome! How was shipping it? How was the product market fit?
We literally held stuff together with duct tape as the project also turned the Oculus into a VR + AR system. Taped 2 webcams to act as eyes as then you could toggle VR and AR.
Shipping it was stressful (renderer was in Ogre3D) and product fit well my face thanks to all the tape.
One application is a toy. The other is catching mistakes before applying hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When I did this for a home remodel, the big difference was that it was AR and not just VR. Being able to experience where the virtual changes line up with the real world makes a huge difference.
Definitely a useful application for this but the article isn't doing AR at all, so it is just VR. The most common VR headset according to Steam can also do the same thing (but probably not as well).
"Ah yes, how hard could it be?", he confidently asks.
> What am I missing?
So much.
> This is an absolutely standard feature of any VR headset that has ever been released in the history of VR headsets
The article is describing "room scale positioning". The first consumer available headset to offer this was released in 2016.
It may feel like it's been around forever if you're not familiar with the space except as a consoomer, but exploring a 3d space at room scale has only recently come into the realm of possibility for consumer grade headsets. For much of the 80s and 90s (and 00s), it was head tracking only. Real time positioning and moving around required positioning hardware that was a magnitude more expensive - and pretty much always had very specific space limitations. Sure, it existed to some degree, but it was such inexpensive addition that using an expensive and complicated treadmill was often considered the economical choice.
In fact, I don't think there was even a "professional" solution that offered room scale positioning before the vive. Previously, they all had specific limitations like a 4 x 4 foot area or were massive tech demos that existed in a quantity of one in a university basement somewhere, running a very tailored demo, and they certainly weren't feasible in the 90s.
> Make a 3D world, walk through it.
First of all, how do you map the room? Do you set up lighthouses? Low latency positioning? To do what is in the article, you need a large space and the ability to map into it. Only recently, has "inside out" tracking become feasible. Previous generations didn't have it, and it's almost a guaranteed requirement for any large scale deployment of VR - for example, exploring multiple rooms.
Second, how do you create the "3d world"? It may seem simple, but VR headsets require more than double the graphical computation, and that means that any geometry and graphics you inert of the world needs to be within the compute budget of the headset solution. The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly out of fusion and have it render without hitting the compute budget limit is amazing and really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
Lastly, stitching, the 3-D solution and compositing, and the real world is a very difficult problem. Again, it may feel like we've had the technology, but really we haven't had the high speed camera solutions in small packages, and the compute power to process all of that in anything approaching a consumer solution. To do what AVP is doing with the USDZ files, composing them into the real world, and even applying lighting information, previously would have required a fleet of large and expensive machines. And that doesn't even include transparency and applying real-world attributes of lighting and reflection onto the USDZ file, a a task that's hard to parallelize.
> Only recently, has "inside out" tracking become feasible.
And the Vision Pro was far from the first to implement it. The most popular headsets in the world all use the tech, now. It's not 2016 anymore.
> The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly [...] really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
Is this a parody? The chip is a laptop-grade APU tethered to a power bank, and you're bragging about pixel-shading a <1000 tri mesh? Your mind will be blown when you discover what the Nintendo Switch can do with 10w.
> And the Vision Pro was far from the first to implement it. The most popular headsets in the world all use the tech, now. It's not 2016 anymore.
I didn't say it was.
> Is this a parody? The chip is a laptop-grade APU tethered to a power bank, and you're bragging about pixel-shading a <1000 tri mesh? Your mind will be blown when you discover what the Nintendo Switch can do with 10w.
OP was talking in the timescale of "since forever", and so am I. Your mind will be blown when you discover what happens when you export that mesh without optimization or LOD maps to a head mounted computer from 2004.
> Only recently, has "inside out" tracking become feasible.
This is what finally enabled Richard Hendricks to develop inside out compression.
Back in the eighties we had to jerk off all our clients manually
> To do what is in the article, you need a large space and the ability to map into it.
No, while you could do this, the article specifically mentions controller support for moving around. But sure, inside out tracking is not available on all VR headsets.
> The fact that the person in the article was able to just export a USDC directly out of fusion and have it render without hitting the compute budget limit is amazing and really speaks to the graphical power of the AVP.
No offense but did you look at what they exported from Fusion? Or the video demo of what they built? The only things that are not blocky are the models downloaded from IKEA. Nothing about this is impressive - AVP can render much better. Even the Meta Quest 3 can render much better.
> Lastly, stitching, the 3-D solution and compositing, and the real world is a very difficult problem.
Yes, but this article makes use of none of it because they are not doing AR.
> No, while you could do this, the article specifically mentions controller support for moving around. But sure, inside out tracking is not available on all VR headsets.
What is in the article is explicitly walking around. Yes, you can do it with controller input.
> No offense but did you look at what they exported from Fusion? Or the video demo of what they built? The only things that are not blocky are the models downloaded from IKEA. Nothing about this is impressive - AVP can render much better. Even the Meta Quest 3 can render much better.
No offense, but mentioning the MQ3 only proves my point. It's amazing how far we've come. Headset mounted compute VR from even 15 years ago would have struggled with this.
> Yes, but this article makes use of none of it because they are not doing AR.
I was just mentioning it. Quote me where I said they were doing that, thanks.
Sorry but we did all that for previs for $big_space_movie. On a shoestring budget in 2011.
> In fact, I don't think there was even a "professional" solution that offered room scale positioning before the vive.
Yeah there was, you mounted some markers on your headset and attached the mocap camera on marker set.
Obviously as a consumer you needed to either use vive or oculus. (and wait for them to come out, but there were other HMDs around. but they were shit and expensive)
> VR headsets require more than double the graphical computation,
I mean yes, but rasterising two cameras isn't usually double the processing. You deffo need to be running at higher framerate all the time though. Otherwise you feel sick (ask me how I know...)
but real talk here, that demo isn't a graphics stress test. its low poly simple lighting and a skybox with a 2048x2048 texture on it. You could probably do that with a mobile phone arkit/core and those shitty little len boxes that came out in 2015.
> but really we haven't had the high speed camera solutions in small packages,
I mean thats not really true. LG made a phone with a 120fps camera in it in 2006. (my timing might be hazy, but its deffo been almost twenty years.) Also the other thing is the cameras don't run at that higher resolution, well not the RGB ones anyway. but thats irrelevant here, as they arent used in this sim.
Also, I don't think the slam on the AVP is running at 90hz, I think a lot of the work is done with sensor fusion, as its way cheaper, faster and accurate. (Again I never took apart the AVP, only oculus. but logically it makes sense as higher frame rates means less usable light, slam is also rather expensive to run.)
> And that doesn't even include transparency and applying real-world attributes of lighting and reflection onto the USDZ file, a a task that's hard to parallelize.
eh? There isn't real world lighting in this. there aren't even any pbfs its just flat textures and ambient lighting. USDZ isn't some magic new world format. its a reasonably nice scene description format.
Transparency is a first class primitive in 3d since for ever. You can even do transparent coloured particles (guess what Gaussian splats are...)
Im not sure what the polygon budget of the AVP is. but the quest 2 topped out at about 1million in unity. I expect the AVP has more, and fancier shader support too.
> Sorry but we did all that for previs for $big_space_movie. On a shoestring budget in 2011.
> Yeah there was, you mounted some markers on your headset and attached the mocap camera on marker set.
You did VR? How did you get the round trip latency below 100ms? That was a serious issue until relatively late in the game. Maybe they cracked it by 2011, but even in 2006, it was a serious issue (mocap rigs are not designed for utra low latency feedback)
We had three different vendors come out and try.
One was a vicon, which was low latency and sexy, another was the USB optitrack, which was utter shite. I don't remember what the third lot used.
The vicon at the time seemed to be low enough latency to useable. The director didn't like the headset so opted for a monitor instead. perhaps it was too higher latency to be practical. ( I didn't get a chance to use the headset, being young and too far down the pecking order. I only got to use the monitor )
For those of us who can’t afford a Vision Pro try the Reality Composer app for iOS. You can create a scene and place 3D models on walls or the floor and then navigate in AR.
It’s useful for placing furniture in your home. The IKEA app used to offer something similar.
Technically there’s no reason you couldn’t do something like a full house too.
This can be done with any modern VR headset but pretty cool nonetheless. cheers
reading some of the comments i was expecting something really high end and polished, but yeah, this is something you could with a headset 1/10th the cost
I was expecting an app that works like the VR version of a laser indoor measuring tool. Where you hold a piece of wooden board and the VR tells you where it should go and then another person wearing a VR helmet attaches it to a post, also at sub-mm precision. Etc.
This can be done with the Google Cardboard :|
People were doing it on Cardboard 10 years ago. https://www.consumerreports.org/home-improvement-remodeling/...
10000% I've seen it done!
Seeing the title and the upvotes, I thought the author just discovered a use case that justifies the ~~$3500~~ $3700 price tag.
To say I am disappointed is an understatement.
Huh. In this case moving a single wall, or repositioning a single window, kitchen island, etc - would cost more than $3500.
The author isn't doing AR/mixed reality so they aren't showing that use case. You can do all of it on a cheaper headset, too.
VR is actually better for architectural visualization
Great, then you can use even cheaper headsets that don't do AR instead.
It would be interesting to see someone apply the principles and techniques of Christopher Alexander to this - trying to "grow" the house virtually and seeing what it might feel like before committing to building it.
Architecture has always been a great fit for VR. Game engines like unreal engine integrate both VR and architecture software for example.
Having experienced augmented reality glasses, I have to say that integration with the external world feels much more powerful than the VR experience ever did. AR is exhilerating, while VR is mostly bland and nauseating. I had the experience of interacting with an entity in AR while in the space I was in, it tickles your brain in a way VR somehow can't.
3D walkthroughs are absolutely the OG[1] use for head mounted displays. I had an interesting experience of a realtor who had a couple of Vision pro headsets that they would let you use to tour properties they had for sale. Definitely faster and easier than driving around only to find you could quickly eliminate a choice. I am not sure what sort of workflow they used to capture the 3D space but I do know they had a Mac pro tower dedicated to running it. As another poster pointed out, if your building a house, having all of the wiring/plumbing/etc in '3D space' databases for your house would come in very handy later as you were doing work on the house. I'm cynical though about timeframes and having data and software for such a niche application work for more than 5 years much less the 10 to 20 you might live in a house.
[1] In the early 90's VRML was going to create a Snowcrash style metaverse of 3D places you could visit.
VRML, now that’s been a while. If I recall correctly it was only a changed header from the Silicon Graphics Open Inventor format.
Yeah pretty much. Was the future though, amirite?
There's no Apple Store in my country, but I travel regularly for work. About a year ago I was in Sydney Australia and took the opportunity to visit one of their Apple Stores to try the Vision Pro.
Having experienced other AR/VR products I was interested to see how Apples general 'refinement' of this product area worked out.
I admit, I had low expectations; and probably for the best, because nothing could've prepared me for what I experienced.
Given this was a gen1 product, I was blown away by how seamless and 'complete' the experience was. There was a few obvious places for refinement like battery-life, weight and the screen. But the immersive experience was incredibly convincing, compelling and even relaxing. The price point clearly needs to come down, and I suspect the technology was a little ahead of its time. But I can see in 5-10 years after continuous iteration and improvement that this product will be something else.
I did something similar in 2020 when we constructed our sauna/guesthouse. Used a program called "LiveHome3D" to build out how what we were looking for, then exported as an OBJ and imported it via Google Poly into "Tilt Brush" on the Oculus Quest.
I also did some light simulations so we could see how the skirting roof around the building would allow light in for summer vs winter.
We have been very happy we used VR. It allowed us to iterate on what felt right, communicate exactly what we wanted to the builder, and the sunlight simulations have allowed it to be comfortably usable year round - letting light in during the winter, but keeping direct light out during the summer.
https://ibb.co/TD9Ygkpy
Nah...
The coolest use I've seen is a research at the University of Alberta (Canada) that aims to use the Vision Pro to alleviate nystagmus[1].
This is a disease on the muscles that control the eyes' direction. It causes the eyes to twitch involuntarily. They use the Visio Pro to "twitch" the image along with the eye, so the patient doesn't feel the jitter. It enables them to read, watch movies, etc.
Another cool one is to use them to substitute the visual field test machines in ophthalmology offices. These are machines that cost U$15 000.00 dollars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nystagmus
Do you have a source for this? Sounds interesting...
the steam frame will also have eye tracking cameras.
I did this using the Meta Quest when designing our bathroom. I used Unreal Engine to set up all the materials, lighting, and VR stuff.
It worked great. There's nothing better than walking through a design. It turned out to be the _only_ way I was able to get over my analysis paralysis and actually commit to the project. I took pictures from all angles and printed them for our contractors, and they found it very useful as well.
It's stunning how similar the real pictures are to our renders. Here's an example for those interested: https://imgur.com/a/y3KXphc
Is it cooler than letting a legally blind person be able to see? https://youtu.be/KbS7IiLEqM0?si=itIRbX3SBDxn18IQ
I definitely resonate with the "my software-oriented brain feels almost incompatible with this world of designing a home"
I really struggle with visualising what things are going to look like. Even trivial stuff like choosing a colour to paint the wall. Sticking tiny paint swatches or painting sections from sample pots just doesn't work either, it's either all or nothing to me. I don't have that aphantasia thing either, quite a vivid imagination actually, but for stuff like home decor and I'm useless
I'm not really in the market for a vision pro or VR headset so my version of this is to take a picture of a space (say a wall) and feed it into on of the AI image generators with a colour - probably taken from a screenshot of a paint vendor, and tell it to generate me an image of what the wall would look like in <this colour>.
Obviously it's not perfect but it's definitely given me a better idea of what, in the ballpark, something would look like when painted on the whole wall.
I've also had some success with getting it to generate stuff with wall decor on as well, even pasting in product images (e.g. "what would this mirror look like") - even on the "painted" wall.
Again, not perfect, but it's helped me a lot.
Vision Pro: when you're done sitting in the dark on your couch looking at photos of the family who left you, you can use AR to remodel your apartment. It even has textures.
Wow that is dark. Personal experience?
Throwback reference to the original Vision Pro launch ad I believe
Perhaps this timecode: https://youtu.be/Btf4mN37OsU?t=52
All that did is make me want to buy one :-)
I forgot this entire product existed
Or to the drug-assisted VR scene in Minority Report. (Though that's even darker...)
The BBC had a programme "Your Home Made Perfect" where they would give people a VR demo of two potential home renovations, then they'd build the one they chose. This was a few years back though, so they're using Oculus Gos [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0g7glgm
But this use isn't specific to the Vision Pro, or am I wrong? What prevents things like that from running on any other VR headset, like my half-broken Quest 2?
It's not. I did a walkthrough of a Sketchup model of my home using Oculus Rift almost exactly 10 years ago.
You can also do this in AR on your phone (and even cardboard): https://sketchfab.com/models/78e5d822497e4cd7bc14308bab8f7df...
A great application for sure.
It prompted me to wonder why environments haven't evolved into fully realistic room makeovers yet. As the writer notes, the hardware is ready for more uses.
The Vision Pro is great hardware, waiting for a beyond-toy-app beyond-media-kiosk OS.
I use it as a Mac screen. But why one "screen". Why not all Mac windows. Why not Mac windows that naturally handle 3D content.
I am talking "mundane" but seamless support. The better use of visual space, the better physical ergonomics of screens that can be easily moved, and no barrier to evolving practical uses for 3D, would create the "NeXT" Pro experience over macOS/Mac over time. Instead of another iOS check out counter.
I believe Steve would have seen the beyond Mac potential.
The first version's hardware is still "Pro" enough for a Pro OS.
Just as a screen, switching between a MacBook Pro and Vision Pro is frictionless (aside from a few seconds to link each time). Eye tracking and pinching could be implemented on the Mac, via its camera/island so physical memory translated both ways.
I use mine every day, with just-out-of-reach frustration in direction proportion to real what-I-have-now appreciation.
the irony is that the most practical use case for a ,500 headset is something a 00 Quest does just as well, but you'd never think to try it on the Quest because nobody told you it was a productivity device
Your legless manager in the daily Workrooms stand^h^h^h^h^floatup glares at you.
Because he’s still in a bad mood from losing his Nintendo Wii tennis game.
We 3D scanned all the rooms in our 100 year old house to better plan renovations, it was way more helpful than I anticipated!
I've done this quite a lot while working at a large architecture firm. It can be great for both small and enormous projects.
Often, the more effort you put into the tiniest details, textures, etc the larger the realism payoff.
I also found that immersion got better when the headset responded to the subtle head movements that we all make.
Apple doesn’t sell the Vision Pro in Spain yet, so acquiring one would require taking a trip to France. For Vision Pro owners: is it worth it? Do you use it often? The post does mention a very compelling use case, but it is quite narrow (how often are you remodelling your house?)
It is the greatest piece of technology I have ever owned, and I have a very hard time recommending it anyone.
It's clear that it is the future. But there's still some steps between where Apple is at with it today, and where it needs to be in order to be a mainstream product. I would look and see if you can find one used either in the local market, or via a short trip if possible.
>It is the greatest piece of technology I have ever owned, and I have a very hard time recommending it [to] anyone.
Exactly my opinion; I got mine on the first day it was available in 2024, yet I use it perhaps 1-2 times/month, to watch a movie.
The main problem being that I'm not about to pay the cost of a pretty nice macbook for a vr/ar headset. I'll be interested to see what price the steam frames comes in at.
>It's clear that it is the future.
What makes you think that?
Favorite tech product I have ever purchased. I use it as my main MacBook display for often 8+ hours per day. As long as you are willing to bump up the font size a bit, the programming experience is fantastic. I use it as a 21:9 display, but it can go up to 32:9. My wife and I watch movies together in the theater environment, and the in-room sharing experience is great. My face and neck were prepared from numerous past headsets, but my wife really hasn't had any comfort issues. Since this is her first headset, I think that just varies by person.
The device is so different for different people. I tried really hard to use my VP as a MacBook display but sitting up in a chair with it on for more than 15 minutes is simply too uncomfortable: too heavy.
I only use it to watch movies, ALWAYS while lying down with my head on a pillow and my feet propped up on cushions. That way I'm able to position the device so as to distribute the weight evenly on my forehead/cheekbones. The revised strap enables the weight to be precisely distributed and altered as needed if it gets uncomfortable.
Interesting. Anybody out there been able to do this with a Quest 3?
There are a couple of ways to do it, but I'm not sure which is best.
you can install an app on OSX that allows you to do a passthrough, but the last time I used it horizon was called workrooms.
On windows you can use the official oculus app to use your local gfx card to render graphics. THat gives you really smooth graphics at much better fidelity.
my colleague used vrdesktop to get more screen estate.
For me the screens on the O3 aren't high enough resolution, I can see the gaps between pixels, which means less dense text.
I did it, it’s possible.
It’s also a terrible experience. Pixelated. Laggy. Can’t see where the keyboard is… it’s half baked.
I can work max one hour then I give up.
Weirdly, the experience with Virtual Desktop on the Quest 3 is fast, high resolution, clean, and all that wireless on WiFi 7.
The resolution but specially the pass through is what kills it for me.
Fix those and I am a buyer, at any price.
Yeah, passthrough is pretty icky, for sure. I just take the headset off. It’s not good enough for passthrough.
i think the q3 and the avp have similar pixel density
The Apple Vision Pro has something like 23 million total pixels vs Quest 3 at 9.1 million total pixels. It's a pretty big difference.
The optics for the avp are noticably softer than quest3 https://kguttag.com/2024/03/01/apple-vision-pros-optics-blur...
so the screen resolution might be higher, the effective resolution is not so much.
The quest feels sharper for a lot of things. Apart from the rgb camera.
Either way, for me, they are both too lower resolution for useful text work. I can see the pixels and the size of the font I want starts to fall below the effective reolution.
I realise that this is not the case for a lot of people though
I tried with a Quest Pro and did not find it enjoyable at all. I have not tried the latest Galaxy headset to compare.
So you have two, one for you and one for your wife? What is it like watching a movie next to someone, with both of you wearing headsets?
I would have been much more likely to get one when I was unmarried, but now with a family it greatly reduces my use cases since I don't watch content alone (except when doing the dishes, when I am largely focused on the real world task in front of me).
Yes, my wife took the M2 version when I upgraded to the M5. We find it pretty great, and it really is not much different from having a huge personal theater. The headsets appear to display the content in perfect sync. When sharing content with someone in the same room, it does not render a persona or avatar as it does when using FaceTime (where users appear as floating heads and hands).
Does she use hers for anything else? Do you ever use them with guests, or does the lens/glasses issue prevent that?
As far as I know, she only uses it for movies and YouTube. I have demoed mine a few times, but I honestly do not like doing it much because it feels pretty gross to share something that sits on my face all day.
I bought one and returned it within the 2 week window, well before the last day. I didn't even use it the last weekend I had it, I couldn't be bothered. When I brought it into the Apple Store to return it, the employee who processed the return seemed happy I was returning it rather than getting stuck with it, she didn't pull her punches when talking about it, which I found a bit shocking from an Apple employee. She marked down the reason for return as "not enough content", so I'm assuming that's why most people return it, but that wasn't really my issue.
While the new head strap was better than the original, it still wasn't all that comfortable to wear. Some things were super sharp, while other things always looked blurry. The window system still seemed buggy and I'd describe it as finicky. The battery doesn't last long enough to feel comfortable untethered, while it also gets in the way while being plugged into the wall. It also felt like a lot of work to actively look at what needed focus all the time. It still feels like it should be in beta, maybe even the lab. I'll be willing to try again down the road, but it's hard to tell how much attention Apple is really giving it, as we haven't seen all that much progress in the last couple years.
It is not worth it. The problem is the weight. For all of the good features it has, it's so heavy that you can't use it very long.
Not worth it. Get a Meta Quest 3 and can vibe code something similar in a few hours. I recommend WebXR that comes with the built-in browser. Easier to distribute, share, collect feedback and iterate than native. And can use A-Frame: open source framework, very accesible and that I help maintain :)
It’s a cool use case, the same thing is achievable with other VR headsets of course. I imagine you can buy a second hand Quest 2 headset for under 100 euros
I keep on hearing it’s a flop, but where I live, Switzerland, they don’t sell it. So I can’t really say.
And I am not even talking about the badly taken product decisions for such a great headset but… how can they get devs onboarded for an app ecosystem for a device that can only be bought in a handful of countries?
Clearly Apple sold it and did their best so that it fails.
It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units. About 350k of those sold in year 1, about 50k sold in year two, and less than 20K so far in year 3. Workers at Apple's flagship retail stores are saying they haven't sold one in recent memories. The tables displaying them are disappearing from stores. Roadmaps for all future goggles have been shelved. It's a flop and Apple knows it.
> It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units.
I don't know why you would post something that is clearly not true? They released an upgraded version, sporting an M5, October 2025. They do not sell the original M2 version anymore.
The only thing you need to see is how many Apple employees use them. Answer, almost none
If it was amazing as a display for work then most Apple employees would be using them at work. It's not, so they aren't
If it was amazing as a movie viewer most Apple employees would be watching movies on them. It's not, so they aren't
repeat for any other use case.
Compare to iPhone/iPad/Mac, every Apple employee uses them. Probably included in that Airpods, Homepods, AppleTV, Apple Watch.
Have you gone around and surveyed Apple corporate employees to gather this insight? I’m amazed that your manager didn’t get a call from Apple security, if so.
They weren't handing out dev fused AVPs in sufficient number for anyone to do this when I left. And Apple software developers rarely buy their own hardware, why would you, when you get most of the hardware for free (and dev fused)?
It is true that buying one for use as an extra monitor was pretty niche at Apple Park. And it’s also true that everyone is crammed into shared offices where it would feel anti-social to be wearing one all the time.
So I’m vaguely aligned with you on the utility to the average dev, but your argument for why makes little sense.
FWIW almost none of my direct reports used HomePods, from your list of freely available devices, and grabbing an iPad for anything other than testing was maybe 50/50. And I don’t think you’d claim the iPad isn’t popular.
Im waiting for v2/smart glasses by now , weight seems to be the most sticky issue to daily usage
I have the inverse, not wanting a v2 but a v0.5 that's 80% of the result for 20% of the price! Okay, it's Apple so it'll never be a good price, but conceptually right?
From what I hear, I'd probably be happy with the v1, just not at 3000€ and not when you need to buy a mac in addition to use various features. Depending on what is supported from open OSes (AOSP or Linux desktop/mobile OSes), I could see myself paying 0.5-1.5k to try if it's something for me. Maybe I could get one off the second-hand market if Apple (or a competitor) ends up making a v2 vision device, so I'll join you in hoping for that :)
The idea that Vision Pro is going to jump from a 600-gram bulky headset into smart glasses any time soon is a widespread delusion.
Instead, what will happen is that it will get gradually slimmer and lighter with each generation, a few hundred grams at a time.
yeah just anything better than current product will do it for me, i agree you can't expect a full visionos blown hardware probably to fit on regular glasses but a man can wish
Vision Pro is dead. Apple couldn't move 500k units in 2.5 years. The Vision Pro tables are disappearing at Apple Stores. Apple's major web pages no longer advertise it. Executives won't commit to follow-up Vision Pros (or Airs, or any goggles.) Retail staff at flagship stores say they haven't sold one in ages. It's over. Apple's facial computing will move to glasses and enclosed VR goggles are dead. Apple funded and partnered Vision Pro content has slowed to a trickle. eBay prices for nearly new Vision Pros are well under 50% of retail. Supply chain experts have seen zero new component purchases since the original test run maxed at 500k units. It's over. (Same for Quest at Meta.)
You really felt this, huh? So much so that you had to post it twice? Damn. Lmao
One of our engineers built a full data center walkthrough tool on an AVP (complete with data pulled from the building CAD files, as well as our internal DC operations tools): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fluidstack_our-latest-hackath...
I'm really excited to see AR take off in use cases like this, given how useful it would be to give all our technicians e.g. a legacy Google Glass (not the Intelligent Eyewear thing) and direct them to a rack, overlay information about a failed component, and walk them through the repair SOP.
You won't sell a $3.5k headset with a pitch like this where a cardboard phone holder suffices. It was supposed to take 3d videos of your children's first steps while your lenticular eyes stare creepily.
Back a billion years ago a friend of mine tried to start up a company visualizing architectural plans in unreal engine (very early, like maybe unreal 1 or 2 .. he tried it in the quake engine first), years later but still a million years ago while working for a retailer I set up a demo with the early oculus rift dev kits allowing us to visualize new department store 'pad' layouts and new fixture (shelves, seating, racks) designs... using unity (the unreal vr support wasn't in yet).
I imagine at least the architectural stuff just happens now.
It’s not gotten very good yet.
We're building a small village of 23 households. During Easter I gave the plan to Opus and asked it to make a threejs rendition. After five or six prompts he really had it down. Then I asked him to add an Easter egg hunting game. Everybody loved it. Last month when I visited the build site it was surreal to visit a video game in real life.
I wish I had a vision pro it would be more awesome. But yes you can quickly create 3d models now from just a drawing. What a time to be alive.
Sounds like the kind of project that would have afforded a Vision Pro, right? I bet you can spot mistakes before building it, that way. Things like, oh, this room will be very dark.
Yes for sure! But we joined when all architecture was already finished, which was many years ago. With a future-neighbour we are looking into porting it all into unreal. Maybe that is just a prompt away but i don't have the time. Though maybe if i spend less time on hackernews I do?
The whole project took 10 years of back-and-forth with local governments and permits. Construction is 9 months. Tragically, all of the original creators left the project because their children had already grown up, or they were growing too old and close to death to invest in something this long term. Mind you this should be the easiest housing project ever; building houses at the edge of a rural village. No wonder house prices in the Netherlands have risen even more than in our neighbouring countries the past 20 years. And just for context, this isn't "lefty-madness". NIMBYism and slow legal frameworks aren't partisan. We've had centre-right-leaning government for 20 years now. This is simply bad government. Or more: Government that prioritizes protecting wealth of the asset-owning class under. If the VisionPro could help with that, that would be a game changer :).
I would put down $3k-$4k for a device that guided me into doing my own renovation/home improvements. Like, I want to take down my cabinets and install a stove vent and then put them up again, or install a solid surface bottom for my shower. Trades people are super expensive right now, and much of the knowledge you could somehow be walked through with AR. Of course there is still dexterity and muscle memory, so maybe it wouldn’t work out well, and then there is heavy lifting.
On the one hand, this a thing most VR headsets can do these days.
On the other hand, we can just do this stuff ourselves now. No movie studio level of equipment required. And THAT is pretty awesome.
I forget the name, but there's also a company that does physical mockup of your house's floor plan that you can walk through, kind of like Von Trier's Dogville, but at least with some walls.
There's definitely a perception gap that needs to be closed for these things, whether through VR or something slightly less digital. That's probably also a big part of the appeal of prefabs.
There's also the open source Sweet Home 3D that has tools for making a model from floor plans and includes a lot of furniture. There's even a WebGL version nowadays. Not sure if it has VR support, but it can export the scene to .obj for which there should be plenty of viewers.
https://www.sweethome3d.com/
Too bad they’re not on phones. But also, it’s a slog to make a room and if you can do that, you probably want a mouse
Here's an idea I hope someone steals:
Mushroom or plant recognition training through navigatable and manipulable gaussian splatters of the speciments in their habitat
Make it recurse for extra coolness - but a model of your house floor plan with yourself standing in it on some furniture surface next to you, that allows you to pick yourself up and place yourself elsewhere. :D
Awesome things..
Also while you are at it- add a Brain Interface reacting to a P300 response with LLM changes to the house depending on what the user looks at :p
folks have been building cars, motorcycles, machine parts, building way before vision pro. outside of tech folks that can diy the pipeline to a large degree, this sounds like a gimmick to extract more money from wealthy folks with some wow factors built-in. not a bad idea for draining money from folks that have it though.
Quest 3 has a 3d explorer (hyperscape) and you can walk around Gordon Ramsay's kitchen.. it was the first "ok, damn" app experience in the quest for me where it felt like you were there.
I can only imagine how powerful that experience would be for experiencing your future house.
Throw in some time-of-day lighting and sun-path illumination... would he great!
Love this. I started doing something similar... back in 2000... in Quake 3. I got off to a good start modeling our future home, but I never got 'round to figuring out how to remove all the terrifying guns and blood-soaked demonic textures.
Should have done it. Should have called it Project Plowshare.
My partner is an architect, and is really good with Unreal for this exact purpose. There's something magical, for a client, about being able to literally walk around the site rendered at Unreal-level fidelity, even if it's not VR.
Disappointingly banal for the field. Spend a couple of minute with your favorite search engine to search for architecture + XR and you will find countless projects, from weekend hackathon prototypes to professional suites to integrations in industrial tools, e.g BIM support, from mobile phone to high end headsets, spanning decades of work.
This is arguably the most banal use of XR, for the Vision Pro or any headset.
It's still cool and useful but if that reaches the top of HR it shows a worrying state of both the platform and the XR industry.
PS: I work in XR and spend time on HN so clearly not the audience.
It’s a heavy lift (prob even a tarpit to investors) but you can’t blame people for trying.
Turns out some popular projects are popular for a reason. It is IMO cool, even if it's not novel.
Yep I even said it's cool but it's a bit like someone being surprised tablets can be used for sketching. If tablets were just released it'd be a nice discovery. If it's years later and there are dozens if not hundreds of sketching solutions to sketch on tablets, it's strange to be surprised by this legitimately cool and precisely popular usage.
What is special about the Vision Pro here? Tons of, as far as I can tell, identical solutions have been around for years for other less expensive devices. Other people in this thread are mentioning them. What's special here except maybe the OP is apple fan
The title says "The coolest use for the Vision Pro," not "The Vision Pro is the coolest way to..." or even "The Vision Pro is worth the money."
This is very _Huxleyan_. I feel disoriented and nauseous thinking about it, the feeling is stronger when I see the 3D models and the enthusiastic writing. There are all sorts of people in the world... Not for me.
I can’t wait for a future where we go into a showroom, use immersive VR to design the house layout, pick materials in the showroom and have the house show up a few weeks later as a prefab kit for a local contractor to put together.
Using VR for archviz has been a thing for quite a while, but my friend who works as a (building) architect told me that clients prefer 3d printed scale models, now that 3d printing got cheap and good.
For my part, the make-or-break part of these kind of visualisations -- assisting home renovation, and interior and exterior design and architecture in general -- has been lighting and materials, not [only] or in any meaningful part 3-D through VR augmentation. I mean I would surely appreciate a fine piece of hardware like Vision Pro put to use here, so the author is on point, it's just that at some point you want to actually see the relative colorimetry at work -- how your beige couch is going to look in that spot illuminated by a giant window facing south etc. It's not as critical as making the house right, since moving a couch is easier by far, obviously, but there are things like kitchen islands that are more costly, featuring slabs of stone that is neither cheap nor easy to move.
Anyway, I've been using Radiance to help me deal with the above issues, but it's for all practical purposes non-interactive. At some point there's bound to be a e.g. Monte-Carlo physically-based ray-tracer for these use cases, featuring radiometry with visually negligible error compared to reference (i.e. if you were looking at the real thing with your eyeballs), that is _interactive_-capable (at least in the frames-per-second category and not seconds-per-frame). It's probably already out there, but people have different preferences as to the tools they wish to employ. I like Radiance because it's text mode and gives you a lot of quality for all the text editing and tool composition (which frankly is a bit weird, Greg Ward was sure a maverick!), but mileage varies there.
One could see this with a Google Cardboard and a phone, not just a headset.
But bringing the tools to the masses to create something like this, well that’s another story (one that I’ve been pursuing for many years myself).
Thanks, Christian!
I think you can get the same experience on much more affordable VR glasses. Also installing an APK is easier than all the Xcode/Apple signing/device pairing etc.
The (many) interior designers we consulted before renovating our house used A/VR to show us what those changes could look like. The AR experience was the most surreal and useful, though.
Thanks for sharing this. The personal observations were far more interesting than another discussion I read about hardware specs. I'd love to read more long-term experiences like this
Wren Kitchens (in the UK) was using VR to let customers "walk through/try" their kitchens via VR 5 years ago, it was a neat use case.
Where can one find out more about this?
Personally I think 3D sports for Apple TV would be a game changer. I used 3D glasses + special TV in 2010 to watch the world cup and it was awesome.
Watching some of the Lakers courtside games on the Vision Pro was awesome, and I’m not even a Lakers fan. If they rolled that out more broadly it would be a system seller for sports fanatics.
There were full-length NBA Lakers games in the Vision Pro headset earlier this year. I watched a few - super cool. They even had a separate announcer just for the immersive broadcast.
The experience was terrible. IN good VR, you control the POV. Those games just tossed you around to different areas without warning. It would have sucked a lot less if they either kept one view or if they gave us a way to control the view changes. Without those, I'd never watch a season of any league, just too jarring and too inconsiderate of the user. Apple used to do so much better. Now they throw cash at third parties hoping to make something happen and those third party content producers mostly suck.
Spot-on. There was a really good article somewhere about how Apple is clueless re: what sports fans want and expect.
It is absolutely unreal the experience watching the ~10 minute sports games on the Vision Pro. The thing is 4 grand but that’s how much the first 4K TVs were. Hope the price can drop where this becomes a more widespread experience, I am a virtual daily user of my AVP
Yes, the latest Real Madrid 20-minute-long immersive video blew me away: WAY better than those NBA games.
For sports?
Yes, I was hoping they would actually offer some kind of partnership with the sports leagues to stick a few of their cameras in stadiums and offer live sports games, but I don't think there's nearly enough users to support it (at $4k its an insane thing to buy), but honestly I don't even regret it, best gadget I've ever bought. About 80% of my time is spent using Mac Virtual Display, this is so much better than monitors -- I can work literally laying down or in any position, so much more screen real estate, plus it just feels like living in the matrix. But YMMV of course...
But -- you should DEFINITELY book a free demo at an Apple Store, just to see what its like and decide for yourself
This was my university degree honours project 12 years ago, but using oculus rifts!
Nice. I would love to model all my existing furniture and while in VR be able to move things to test different arrangements!
It is even great for those with night blindness navigating in a large space. I wish there were night vision glasses.
I made this: https://github.com/dsernst/NightVision
but the OS blocks it when it gets too low-light, disabling all AR features :'(
I did this in a iPad when we were designing our apartment that we were buying, including furniture and kitchen.
No matter the marketing effort, nothing would ever make me want any of the 3D visors on the market.
I think it needs Disney's HaloTile. So he can walk the whole house in Vision Pro in his apartment.
Undoubtedly cool, but not something you couldn't do with a less expensive VR headset?
Reading the title, I expected something about mounting fans to the headset.
An effect of the heat wave, maybe.
How is this thread +700 points? Nothing new here. Good promo Christian
This is a killer use case, but you should also take a peek at the Human Factors Handbook -- it's got great information about how to architect buildings like homes that will help you avoid some pitfalls I've seen in custom homes that I've been the second owner of.
I'm curious here but can't find that title. Do you mean the "Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics" by Gavriel Salvendy and Waldemar Karwowski?
This is very cool. Also, I had forgotten that the Vision Pro exists.
> One day there will hopefully be a house on this land
We''re burning the world and destroying biodiversity, yeah let's continue our destruction with tech as a bonus, this is awesome.
I wonder if this would work with the oculus pro?
How do you tell from VR if hallway is cramped?
You walk down it. Extend your hands, see if they pass through the walls, etc. If you've never used VR before this can be hard to explain with words, but "it's like you're really there" in terms of spacial presence at least. Something about being able to turn your head and have the camera perfectly mirror that movement helps your brain with all sorts of depth cues that are harder to pick up with a flat panel.
here i was thinking this was a link to the latest wd video where he destroys a cybertruck while wearing vision pro's...
How's the upstairs looking?
I feel like this is supposed to be a "gotcha", but this is VR, not AR.
So you can just, move up.
Or use a drone. I'm just being clever.
> On top of this, the housing market is really expensive right now in many parts of the world (ours definitely included) so making good use of every square foot feels paramount.
I mean, if you already have the land, "the housing market" doesn't really matter. The construction costs are a relatively small % of housing costs in expensive markets; usually the land is the biggest factor.
Plus, when you're building, the cost of each marginal square foot is relatively small.
The most expensive dollar is the one you don't have. Not everyone has a flexible budget.
From my (limited) experience, construction costs can tend to rise with the local real estate market. Those construction workers also have a mortgage or rent that they need to pay every month, and buy goods and services from other people with mortgages or rent to pay.
There was an article shared today about skilled laborers are in very short supply wherever data centers are being constructed, so that may not be a universal truth.
Not sure what it says about Vision Pro for this to be the coolest use of it.
Sorry, usually not that snarky but.. c'mon...
MyHouse.WAD
Creepy shit, worse yet, expensive creepy shit. Glad that this thing bombed.
It's only going to get worse
off topic: Is the sentry banner at the top of the blog an ad? It seems to be, but it's also embedded fairly naturally and uBlock isn't blocking it.
Am I so used to shit-tier ads that a "tasteful" ad confuses me?
ngl this makes me want a vision pro. checked my bank account. RIP
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I agree. Despite the housing shortage, no more houses should ever be built. If you're late to the party and don't like getting wet in the rain, I dunno, find a cave or something.
Shame on you for suggesting someone desecrate a cave by using it for shelter. The only acceptable options are $500k houses or refrigerator boxes in the park.
Human experience is a part of conservation. Without a house, these trees would get clear cut once they are big enough to be worth anything. With a house, the homeowner will want to keep them.
It's true, you should only live on top of people.
(I'd say it would be sweet to plant 2x as many trees as are cut! Especially if one has the expertise to pull that off in a meaningful way... lotta big companies ran into trouble trying to do similar in carbon credit scheme contexts.)
Also if the land's protected then you're right. In California, from Muir Woods to Big Sur, more segments would be countless mansions instead of redwoods w/o hard-fought battles & generous philanthropy. But not sure we're given enough data to sideeye Christian (post author and UX extraordinaire).
Humans destroy to create shelter; this can be done responsibly, meeting the Earth & Maslow's needs.
Do not tell people what to do with their land
but also don't you dare build that affordable housing next to mine
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Ok then I'll cut the trees regardless
And you’ll be a fool
As cool as it is, I do wonder how much life is left in the Vision Pro, it's clearly failed massively. I know they didnt expect to sell loads, but they're still sitting on stock made when it first came out, and seemingly have no plans to do any major updates.