Do Training Bikes Dream of Electric Cities ?

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality is making the headlines in the newspapers and magazines today. But unlike 25 years ago when the first VR rage started with the first Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) infrastructures VR is now a technique that is available at very low costs.Especially the recent advances and developments in low cost VR hardware mainly the Head mounted displays (HMD), in particular those that use mobile phones but also the PC based systems like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive together with recent software developments allow this change. Naturally this is based on the interest of the Gaming Industry and the big players in the smartphone industry. But at the moment there are nearly no tools for architects available within these systems. In our point of view there is the big potential that these technologies can give new opportunities to architects and designers to use VR and AR as part of their design toolbox and not only as a presentation tool. For us this is the most important aspect. In our projects we therefore try to develop a workflow that can be easily used even without programming and scripting skills.