Earlier this year, MAVRiC were approached to develop an exciting Virtual Reality (VR) application that aims to address the need for sustainable urban agriculture. In collaboration with the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership and the University of Brighton, our task was to reflect, and perhaps enhance the principles outlined in Dr Mikey Tomkins “Edible Map”Continue reading “Virtual Reality for Urban Gardening: Creating the Model”
Author Archives: Alex Judd
Photogrammetry to Augmented Reality: A How To Guide
I was very excited to see the release of Unity AR Companion app this week. Object scanning, placement, and integration with unity projects all achievable in one app… at a cost. I was disheartened to see that it requires a Unity MARS license (which to their credit has a free trial period for 45 days)Continue reading “Photogrammetry to Augmented Reality: A How To Guide”
How to Run a Successful VR Workshop
Happy new year! (It’s still okay to say that, right?). How are your new year resolutions going? Whether you’ve got one or not, we’d like to propose one more for 2022 – especially to those who got a VR headset for Christmas or are currently digging through the January sales. Your goal is to RunContinue reading “How to Run a Successful VR Workshop”
This update turns your VR headset into an AR headset
Oculus have recently released their passthrough API to enable developers to produce augmented reality applications for the Oculus Quest headsets. Yep, you heard me right, your VR headset is now also an AR headset, (and just by updating it)! If you’re anything like us, what you probably want to know is whether it’s any good?Continue reading “This update turns your VR headset into an AR headset”
Double Tap: Powerful AR Interactions
In a previous blog post, we discussed how to create rotate and scale functions in AR. Let’s say you now want the object to do something else, like animate, change colour or explode, you’d add a button right? Wrong! There’s still lots more UX design we can do here. In this post, I’m going toContinue reading “Double Tap: Powerful AR Interactions”
Git, GitHub and Game Engines: A How to Guide
Game engines are complex bits of kit, and a lot of the time we’re trying and testing things out to see what works best. Sometimes, the things we do in these game engines can’t be undone, or all that time we spent working things out was for nothing and now we have to go andContinue reading “Git, GitHub and Game Engines: A How to Guide”
A Guide to VR Input in Unreal Engine
If you’ve been following our series of blog posts, you may have come across our ‘how to’ guide for Unity’s input system. Thanks to OpenXR making extended reality devices easier to design for, more and more development platforms are adopting the initiative and expanding their input library. In this post, similar to our Unity guide,Continue reading “A Guide to VR Input in Unreal Engine”
Level Up Your AR UX Design
How’s the pergola going you ask? Great thanks! My parents have bought the materials for its due for delivery next week. I even managed to show them the AR model I made in the previous blog post when I went up to their house for a socially distanced garden cuppa. Except the app didn’t doContinue reading “Level Up Your AR UX Design”
Why your 3D gamified models are not VR ready…
Gamification is the process of tweaking 3D models so that they attribute similar features of a typical game, but with the objective to promote learning/understanding. In the AEC industry, this typically means turning our 3D BIM heavy architectural models into ‘archviz’ models or ‘data interrogation’ models, usually to migrate with software like game engines. TheContinue reading “Why your 3D gamified models are not VR ready…”
Teaching myself how to juggle using VR
I’ve always wanted to be able to juggle, its one of those things that when other people do it, it looks really easy and you can’t work out why you can’t just do it immediately. I’m currently reading Jaron Lanier’s ‘Dawn of the New Everything’ (great book by the way), in the book, he brieflyContinue reading “Teaching myself how to juggle using VR”
What you need to know about getting started with Augmented Reality in Unity
During the Christmas break my dad mentioned to me that he was thinking about getting a pergola for his garden in time for the summer. Now that everyone is bound to their homes at the moment, I said it was a good idea, he also offered (suggested) that I do the design for it sinceContinue reading “What you need to know about getting started with Augmented Reality in Unity”
How to make beautiful looking SketchUp models, VR ready, for free
When it comes to Arch Viz, there’s a lot of ‘out of the box’ options out there, but if you’re anything like us at MAVRiC, you probably love using and abusing free software for all it’s got. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss things you need to consider when making your SketchUp modelsContinue reading “How to make beautiful looking SketchUp models, VR ready, for free”
What you need to know about Unity’s XR Toolkit and its new input system
Are you confused by the new input system for Unity’s XR Interaction Toolkit? I was too when I first saw it, especially as I’d mainly been using Unity for solely VR and AR purposes. However, you shouldn’t be! It’s actually a lot simpler than it looks and you should definitely be using it because itContinue reading “What you need to know about Unity’s XR Toolkit and its new input system”
These free VR apps will help leverage your building design projects
Over the past 3 years, whenever we speak to construction professionals about VR and what it could do for them, the same thing comes up time and time again. “We need something to show our clients, I know someone that used this on their clients, and they were amazed!”. And yes, VR is great forContinue reading “These free VR apps will help leverage your building design projects”
One of our favourite conferences came to the UK
We were all sat in a café when I found out that we were going to attend CITC11. It was amazing to think that all the research we had done over the year would make it into a conference that has some of the most prolific speakers in the construction industry. I went on theContinue reading “One of our favourite conferences came to the UK”
Utilities aren’t ready for augmented reality, and here’s why…
The world beneath our feet is a complex one (or a messy one depending on your opinion of it). Either way, it seems like with the technology we have at our hands, it’d be easier to make sense of it all? Wouldn’t it be great if we could hold up our phones and see allContinue reading “Utilities aren’t ready for augmented reality, and here’s why…”
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