Recent Posts
Virtual Reality for Urban Gardening: Creating the Model
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…
CITC 12 – In Person Conferences are Back!
After a two-year hiatus, the twelfth Construction in the Twenty First Century conference returned, this year, in Amman, Jordan. We at MAVRiC are very pleased to have attended this…
Metaverse Part One: The World is Not Enough!
Preface From this week, we start a series of discussions with an aim to investigate the Metaverse(s). These blogs are our vantage points regarding the matter and will put…
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…
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…
AT Journal: XR in a post pandemic world.
We’re very pleased to share that one of our members Alex Judd, has recently written an article in the Winter 2021 edition of the Architectural Technology Journal. You can…
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…
How One Rendering Technique Is Improving VR Performance (Part 2)
In our previous blog we covered some fundamentals of FR, let’s now take a look at how it’s being delivered today and some exciting technologies which surround it. Fixed…
South East Construction Expo 2021
We’re very pleased to share that we will be presenting at the South East Construction Expo 2021! The South East Construction Expo is an innovative business-to-business event, dedicated to…
How One Rendering Technique Is Improving VR Performance
Rendering virtual reality is resource-intensive. It involves simultaneously rendering two high-resolution displays, one for each eye; hence why VR requires powerful hardware in order to process and deliver the…
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,…
iAI?!
Prologue To AI or to not AI, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take…
UE4 Variant Sets (PtII): Runtime
Following on from our previous blog discussing variant sets in Unreal using the variant manager, this time round we’re going to look at how to get the functionality executing…
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…
Does AI forget things?
More than any other blogpost I have written so far, this post seeks to raise a question which has been bothering me for a while. So, I thought I…
UE4: Start Using ‘Variant Sets’ Today
Are you someone who provides a service or product where presenting customisability or options are of importance? If so, “variant sets” are a need-to-know feature of the Unreal Engine.…
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…
The Next Challenge for/of AI
Prologue While visiting Penn State University’s Department of Architectural Engineering and Stuckeman School in 2007, I came across the concept of Emotional Intelligence in a workshop by G. Brent…
Fun Ways to Use Point Cloud in VR
Capturing point cloud data is an interesting pursuit, however post-production to clean up these scanned assets if often the opposite and can be quite a tedious task depending on…
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…
5? No! 32? No! 33 or Virtureality 2.0…
Prologue My other post about virtuality was read and I got some suggestions from some of the people I care about as to maybe I want to write a…
Why the answer to mass VR adoption might lie in your pockets…
Intro Does virtual reality have to be about expensive headsets, workstation or gaming rigs, complex software or all of the above? Yes. For the most part, at the moment,…
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,…
Virtureality: Boon or Bane?
Prologue 1 We, Homosapiens, have undergone a constant and steady evolutionary process over the course of the last millennia. We are still undergoing this evolutionary process in the digital…
5 Essential Extensions For Modelling In SketchUp
Be it for virtual or augmented reality, architectural visualisation, design etc. One powerful skill is the ability to model in 3D quickly and effectively. SketchUp is one such tool…
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…
This journey all started 6 years ago, and it was all Simon’s fault! (PtV)
Chapter 8: Well to be totally fair, this one was not particularly Simon’s fault! This one had more to do with Mr Michael Dell! My first laptop I carried…
LiDAR contenders: How do they measure up?📏
Several months ago we took an in-depth look at MagicPlan with their updated LiDAR scanning capabilities and compared how effective it was against traditional pen & paper approach. We…
Our CITC11 conference papers were published in a Springer collection
Springer If you have read Alex’s post of 13th Oct 2020 (One of our favourite conferences came to the UK) and Simon’s post of 20 Oct 2020 (How to…
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…
This journey all started 6 years ago, and it was all Simon’s fault! (PtIV)
Chapter 7 (The show must go on!): If you have followed my story in Part I, Part II of this blog, you know by now that we are going…
🎓Try This At Home: Quick VR in Unreal Engine
Want to know how to ‘Matrix’ yourself into a project as quick as possible? Please read on… 💊 Following on from our previous post on Unreal’s Datasmith which looked…
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…
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Design
We all remember HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (or at least I DO) and I, for one, am a fan of “Person of Interest”, but this is not…
🎓Try This At Home: Datasmith for Unreal
Intro Having been an avid gamer for many years, when I got my hands on a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 sometime around 2005, my focus laid squarely on…
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…
User involvement, participatory design and other good stuff through VR, AR and I don’t know… some other good stuff…
We’ve heard tons of bad stuff in the news recently to the extent that we are now on the verge of questioning the existential need for, and/or losing our…
MagicPlan: Now with added LiDAR 🧂
Your measured surveys are taking too long aren’t they? You want surveys complete in the time it takes to drink that cup of tea the client has made -…
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.…
This journey all started 6 years ago, and it was all Simon’s fault! (PtIII)
Chapter 6 (or how did I learn AutoCAD?): The short answer is with difficulties, to say the least! The long answer… well, that’s the story of this chapter. But…
How to Survive your 1st Conference…
If you love public speaking as much as I do – it’s lots, lots and lots – you can imagine how uneasy excited I might be at the prospect…
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…
This journey all started 6 years ago, and it was all Simon’s fault! (PtII)
Chapter 4: My first official post in a university as a computer demonstrator started post-revolution (see my previous post)! As I was pretty good at computer programming in GW-Basics…
A look inside industry perceptions of augmented reality
New technologies will always be fascinating; they challenge the way we do things and how we experience them. This fascination is usually, in my case anyway, accompanied by grandeur…
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…
This journey all started 6 years ago, and it was all Simon’s fault!
Chapter 1: My passion for and journey in the digital world started when I was about 9 or 10 (and that’s just about four decades ago!) and with a…
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