Virtual Reality in Architectural Design Revisited

This paper gives an overview of several years of joint efforts of two European universities to develop a workflow that enables architects to use Low-Cost Virtual Reality (VR) based on Head-mounted display systems (HMD) in the architectural design process. The main goal was to find out if using VR in the design process can be beneficial for the design process, provide additional insights within reasonable effort and enable people working in the field with little scripting and programming experience to make use of these systems. To make this possible, we wanted to have some simple commands in the virtual environment to change the geometry of the design. In our workshops, students of architecture worked with students of civil engineering with a focus on computer science. The workflow is based on Unity as a software platform to prepare the geometry for the virtual world. We developed scripts for manipulating building parts such as walls and windows. The goal is that these scripts developed by the engineering students can be used with little adaption within the scripting skills of architects for new geometries. The project was already presented at several international conferences where we presented our experiments with self-developed low-tech interfaces and workflows using VR in the design process. With this paper, we give an overview of different VR platforms and summarise and finalise our findings based on the insights we gained with our joint student workshop.