VR as a Design Tool
A discussion of how the architectural design process could be revolutionised by the use of Virtual Reality tools, originally published in Architecture Today.
Softroom was founded 25 years ago with the intention to explore both the real and the virtual worlds of architecture. But back then, the technology for virtual reality was still a rarefied world of computers the size of fridge freezers and unconvincing graphics. Fast-forward to today, and the medium has both evolved unbelievably in terms of realism and is becoming affordable, accessible and available on the desktop of most designers. So it’s finally able to be part of the everyday workflow of a design studio. We’ve found it applicable in multiple ways; as a design development tool, as a presentation and review format and as a medium to be explored in its own right.
In our work for clients as diverse as the NHS and Turkish Airlines, the ability to test design options for impact and ergonomics has been invaluable, whether checking the accessibility of a reception desk at a GP’s surgery or the sight-lines to the cinema screen in an airport lounge. For client review and approvals, being able to immerse prospective corporate bookings agents in a prototype Hilton hotel room, without needing to build a mock-up, unlocked an impossible time schedule. And the ability to freely explore an entire space won the approval of executives at Virgin Voyages, who were otherwise limited to trying to piece together the vast and complex set of spaces of a giant ship from isolated fragmentary ‘real-world’ mockup pieces - a lift car in Genoa, a staircase in a shed in Stratford...
I firmly believe that one of the most powerful ‘use-cases’ for virtual media are as a record of loss. Through 3D scanning they give us the ability to record the experiences of communities and places that we may be about to lose to rising seas, and overconsumption, and then share them immersively with a global audience and future generations. But alongside this they give us the power of resurrection, allowing us to experience designs that were either lost, or never realised.
In our own practice, we have been able to loop back and revive early conceptual designs for Wallpaper magazine from nearly 25 years ago, which - though fully resolved in 3D - were only ever reproduced on the printed page and which we’d never before experienced life-size and immersively. A bit like suddenly discovering a colour photo of a great-grandparent you’d only ever seen before in black and white.
And we’re recreating in VR the guilty pleasures of the ‘Upper Class’ Boeing 747 interiors we designed for Virgin Atlantic in 2001 (the last real examples of which have just been forced into retirement by Covid-19). Our same 3D models that were used as the basis for prototyping and manufacture are completing their ‘afterlife-cycle’ by being brought into VR and coloured in with our memories of that perhaps now defunct ‘golden-age’ of luxury global travel.
Looking forwards, what interests me most is to explore the potential of virtual and augmented realities as an artistic medium themselves, not just as glorified design models or the backdrops to video games. They are inherently spatial media - and by rights that is the territory of the architect. Liberated from the constraints of budget and gravity, what might we feel free to explore? Especially so when the opportunities for ‘wasteful’ expressive design in the real world become rightly reduced by the imperative of the climate crisis.