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Hosting Design Reviews in XR: A Practical Guide for Today's Hybrid Work Environment

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The XR team at Autodesk will join an architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) customer to lead this hands-on session where you'll learn about practical methods for hosting more-effective design reviews in today's hybrid work environment using extended reality (XR). You will learn how to easily connect project data into XR and how to manage headsets. You'll discover the best virtual reality (VR) use cases for fully remote, hybrid, and conference room settings, you'll see some screensharing best practices, and more. The customer will then guide the class in sharing a recent project and the practical VR workflow their company uses today. The outcome: better project clarity, better stakeholder engagement, and more-efficient design reviews—all making alignment easier and objectively more fun!

Key Learnings

  • Learn how to acquire and manage VR headsets for your teams.
  • Learn how to connect data from Autodesk Construction Cloud into VR.
  • Learn how to host an effective design review in VR in any work setting.
  • Learn how to easily connect VR action items back into Autodesk Construction Cloud.

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      AUSTIN BAKER: Hello, everyone. Happy AU 2023. We're honored and excited to have you here joining us for our session of Hosting Design Reviews in Extended Reality. Today's session is a practical guide for today's hybrid work environment, and talking about how we can move our design reviews into this immersive technology. And before we get into that, we have a brief safe harbor statement for us here acknowledging we may be talking about some forward-looking technologies. Anything we talk about should not affect your purchasing decisions within Autodesk.

      But today, we're joined-- myself is your host, Austin Baker-- we're very fortunate to have with us Gabe Paez, the Head of XR at Autodesk. Gabe is tasked with visioning the future of extended reality at Autodesk starting with AEC and immersive design reviews. And we're also joined today by Gary Cowan, Head of Digital Construction at Kane. Gary's been a pioneer in VR for quite a while. He's been working on very technical projects within Kane. And without spoiling what you're about to see, he's been able to do some really innovative work with extended reality to bring some of these projects forward at a very rapid pace.

      So the reason why we're meeting today is talking about how as a holistic approach, we're going to bring our design reviews into extended reality for more sustainable outcomes and faster approvals moving through. So beyond just starting with the promise of extended reality and it brings us, we'll be starting first with talking about how we can acquire and manage some of these VR headsets for our teams. We'll talk about how we can connect some of our connected data from Autodesk Construction Cloud into these VR experiences.

      From there, we'll talk about the different methods of how we can host these design reviews based on where we're working, whether it's hybrid, remote, or even in-person in some of our conference settings. And then finally, we'll talk about how from these meetings in extended reality, how can we take these action items back into our existing workflows in these cloud environments like Autodesk Construction Cloud to move our projects forward at a faster pace.

      So with that, we're going to start by setting the ground of what is the promise of extended reality, acknowledging that this is no longer an emerging technology, but a very practical tool that's being used by firms today, like Kane Group, like many others, and transforming how we collaborate on our work and bring it faster forward. So starting with acknowledging first, what are the problems that we're addressing in our AEC industry?

      GABE PAEZ: All right, thanks. Thanks so much, Austin. This is going to be really fun today. We've been working in this industry for a long time, both in AEC, and in XR, and there are a lot of lessons learned over this period of time. And each of us, myself, Austin, and Gary bring different perspectives to this having brought so many different people through XR experiences, and, honestly, even just communicating the promise of XR, both for design reviews and beyond.

      So we're going to dig into all this stuff. Let's start with design reviews specifically, and really what is the promise? Why are we here? What's the benefit of shifting the format of a design review from a traditional format, either in a conference room, or on Zoom, or Teams, into an immersive environment in virtual reality or even augmented reality?

      So jumping into that, well, number one, we've got complex projects with globally distributed stakeholders, and everyone needs to align on what we're actually building. Changes that you make early on are far superior to updates and revisions that happen later down the pipe. So number one, we want to create a more efficient design review, and efficiency comes in many forms. I think, number one, just making better decisions.

      Number one, focusing participants in a unified way where everyone is aligned and understands what is happening. And then, number three, just making sure that the amount of time that we spend really digesting this material is proportionate to the value we can gain. So we're assembling action items that can then roll into the rest of our process, and we can do this together synchronously in a really tight design review.

      Number two, we want to make sure we're not overlooking any issues together, so spatial issues that maybe you would miss if you're looking at this in a 2D form, or even in an immersive fly-through, not fully immersive, but like a video fly through, you're just going to miss things that you'll see if you're actually walking that building in a VR headset. And then last up here, just misunderstanding the data itself. So seeing something, I think most people have had this experience where two people are looking at the same drawing and agreeing that we're seeing the same thing, but they're not actually seeing the same thing.

      They're imagining what this is going to be in a way that isn't aligned. So largely, this happens with the client. They're not as familiar with looking at plans as those of us who are doing this every single day. And so you get this misunderstanding of what's directly in front of your face, that if you're standing in that immersive environment, you're really able to comprehend and align on what's the design intent is at a new level.

      So what are the benefits here? Well, number one, it is that alignment. It is the accessibility of having everyone be inside of this space and controlling it on the same level. We're so accustomed to one person driving in a traditional design review. XR is a little bit different because everyone can come inside and they can access data, they can interact with the model, they can take measurements on their own accord.

      And so really that democratization of access to the 3D environment and the BIM data is really a big aspect of this. So ultimately, you're making better decisions. It's more cost-effective to make those decisions because honestly, at this point, even getting headsets into the hands of everyone-- which we'll go over in a bit-- is cost effective, it's efficient. And ultimately, we're creating more sustainable outcomes by making better decisions earlier on.

      So what are really our capabilities today? Well, number one, what we're going to talk through mostly here is an immersive design review-- how to actually facilitate that design review in XR, how to collaboratively make decisions inside of this immersive environment, and then really coordinating on that project data in reat-time. And so how do we reference this BIM project data directly from Autodesk Construction Cloud, reviewing issues, and then flow those right back into our workflow as we move along?

      So I'm going to hand this off now over to Gary from Kane who's going to just give a little bit of his background with VR and utilizing this technology, as he's championed this inside of his firm. Go ahead, Gary.

      GARY COWAN: Thanks very much, Gabe. It's a pleasure to be here today on with these two guys and chat about how we implemented VR at Kane Group. My name is Gary Cowan, and I'm the Head of Digital Construction at Kane. I've worked for Kane Group for about 10 years now, and I have really championed BIM and from its inception in Kane and the development of our digital systems and crossover into the new technologies such as augmented and virtual reality. And it really came about from my own experiences as a gamer really, to be honest.

      I've always been a bit of a gamer myself, and really about 2012 when we started hearing whispers of a consumer headset, I got very excited thinking that the promise of VR with modern technology was hopefully on the horizon. And sure enough, in 2018, I managed to purchase an Oculus Rift, and I was completely blown away by the experience in the immersion of VR. I was never able to play traditional 2D games again.

      You know, I can't even play an Xbox or a PlayStation now. The immersion part of it really has me gripped. And, of course, with playing the VR games for a number of months, the creep started to wander in of how can I use this in my daily job. You know, I spend all day drawing beautiful 3D models, and how can I use this technology then to view this and consume this data in a totally different way than had ever been seen before certainly, in the construction industry?

      And I set about doing a bit of research and development in late 2018 where I stumbled across the guys at IrisVR and the team that were producing Prospect. And we looked at a number of solutions at the time that were available on the market, including The Wild gear, which was your baby at the time. But we really felt at the time that Prospect really fit Kane as a good fit for the software. It was very intuitive. It was a good control system.

      And we very quickly ruled it out once it was realized by the senior team in Kane and the directors. Once the technology was understood and sort of the initial problems were ironed out that we'll talk about here as well, it really took speed and took hold very quickly. And then obviously, as time has progressed and the technology has progressed, we have rolled out various different headsets.

      With the standalone headsets obviously, that are available now we're seeing a much higher adoption and a higher rate of use within Kane, not only from senior management and design teams but right down through to the guys on the ground who are now asking to be part of this VR and XR revolution. And we're currently looking at augmented reality as the next step. So we've sort of looked at VR and have VR kind of nailed down, and AR is kind next on the agenda for us.

      So I'll talk a little bit about how we initially brought it in and what projects we've used it on, and the effect that it had on Kane as a company, and how we did our entire construction process. It really had a profound effect on it. So the initial problems that we faced when we brought the system in were that we had recently changed to use the fabrication services within Revit which was just released in the 2016 Revit release at the time.

      And when we brought that into the 3D environment and the visualization tools because there is no assigned material, everything was gray, and it was very, very hard to distinguish between the services. So it almost stopped the system from working on its first day because whilst it looked great, the immersion wasn't there. We didn't have that grip that it gives you. So we went away not to be beaten again, and went and researched different methods of pulling the data between different software packages.

      And we realized then that Navisworks offered an optimal workflow that allowed us to export the Revit objects, then use search sets to colorize them, and then bring that through into Prospect that gave us a beautiful colorized layout. And that was the first problem that we had as I said. And once that was solved, the real understanding of our BIM models at that stage was that even though they were heavy in elements and quite complex, when you actually looked at them from the inside out, it was quite apparent how bare they were.

      There was no supporting structures. There was no steelwork. There was no clips or hangers or any kind of secondary systems. So for someone like myself with some site experience and background, it showed that to be able to take on what is now known as the DFMA workflow-- the Design For Manufacture and Assembly-- your model must be at almost a one-to-one representation of the actual asset that you're trying to design, or else it's just you're wasting your time.

      You can't leave things to chance as would have been done maybe 20 years ago in the construction industry when I started. Certainly, guys doing design were draftsmen and it was all two-dimensional drawings. And quite a lot of the decisions and the puzzle pieces that had to be decided on were left to the engineers that were on site with their experience and their skills. But as time has passed on site now, that generation of engineers are gone.

      And the generation behind are now being presented with all of these new-fangled technologies and tools that are supposed to make life easier, but literally, it just takes a lot of skill away from the guys on the ground. So the onus really now is on the BIM model to make the BIM model as accurate as possible, as one-to-one-simulation as possible. And VR really was the key to unlocking that for us and being able to look at the model from the inside out.

      So this next slide we showed here shows an example of our first tests that on the left-hand side, that is a bare Revit export strip to Prospect. Whilst it looks amazing, it's very, very hard to distinguish between all the individual pipe runs and duck runs, and made it very hard to trace very complex systems. So as I said before, the Navisworks workflow got around that and let us colorize all of our assets, and made it much more immersive then.

      The primary job that we used it on was the Claridge's Hotel in London. Quick synopsis on the project. The hotel looked to expand on the rooftop with two new floors for quite exclusive seven-star guests. But unfortunately, the existing MEP services lived on the roof at that stage. So the only option, then was to mine below the existing hotel and construct a five-story substructure, concrete reinforced, that all of the MEP services could then be transferred down into, and then reconnect it to the existing risers at the back of the building in the middle of the night while all of the guests stayed in the hotel sleeping.

      And it was a revolutionary project for us at the time, which we've talked about in quite a lot of media and stuff. And the VR was brought in around that time. And that gave us a real unique way of looking at quite a complex structure from the inside out. All of this was pure prefabricated in our head office in Northern Ireland, which is across the Irish Sea from the site. So there was a logistics problem for access and egress to site because the hotel was actually still trading and open above it.

      There was a big onus on noise, and you couldn't just access the site, and because then the sub-basement floor at B5 was actually 40 meters below ground, there was a logistics problem with welding and grinding on site, so everything had to be prefabricated from site. So our Revit had to be brought up to the highest standard possible, and all of the technology surrounding it had to be sort of analyzed and brought into place. And it was really the melting pot or the cooking pot for a lot of the modern methods constructions that we developed in around that time and around 2017, 2018.

      And for me anyway, VR was the first step in all of that journey. It really opened our eyes to looking at technologies that weren't part of our industry. Virtual reality was never used by building services engineers like me in our day-to-day work. It was revolutionary at the time. And for us now, it's kind of standard practice. But it still really isn't in the industry, and that's why I like to talk to people about it and try and push it.

      All of the Claridge's project and the B05 was remotely designed offsite using reality capture point-cloud scans of the basement to remove any building tolerance. And then everything that was constructed in the digital model was then relayed across the cloud to a site-based VR room that we had built in Claridge's Hotel itself for all of the site-based staff and the client themselves to come down and slip a headset on at any stage and be able to walk the floor, see what was being designed.

      Even the colors of the pipes as you can see, they loved the Google-type plant room. And they wanted all of their services to be colorized like the Google plant room. So we were even able to give them options of all the different colors in VR and have them walk the floor in a virtual model rather than just presenting them with 2D static images and stuff. So the immersion is the key. It's hard to describe to anyone that hasn't put a VR headset on. A lot of people just think that it's like you're looking at a big TV screen in the distance, where they don't understand it's complete immersion and binocular vision and stereoscopic 3D. It's hard to get that across.

      And this is a couple of photos of myself and my colleague, Matt Mead, who did quite a lot of the modeling in B05. Doing design reviews, he would have went and did a lot of modeling for a day or two, and then I would have brought him in, and we would have slipped a headset on each, and met in the model together. But then there would have been several other members of staff in the room watching both different perspectives on a projected screen on the wall so everyone could get involved, not just the people that were in the VR.

      Everyone that was in the room really got involved. And we even had people on Teams meetings, watching the live video feeds of both headsets in remote places. So the technology just brought everyone together to look at this one single source of truth for us. And VR as I said, was a key component to opening everyone's eyes to all of these technologies that are just appearing very, very quickly. What we were left with was an absolutely beautiful model and a beautiful asset that we provided to our client, the Maybourne Group.

      Fully-modeled LOD450, every single pipe, screw, nut, washer was modeled in intricate detail, which opened up quite a lot of possibilities for us with digital quantification, scheduling 4D time simulation. It opened quite a lot of avenues for research and development for us. And this was in around 2017, 2018, that we was started this, and it was completed in late 2021 I think it was. And there has been several television documentaries here in the UK about this project as it was quite groundbreaking at the time.

      AUSTIN BAKER: Well, Gary, thank you for sharing that project there. What's so cool to me about that one, in particular, is how you take such a complex multidisciplinary Revit Navisworks file and really able to bring the whole team in as you mentioned. And it was really cool how we saw in that projector room how you're able to share that with some of your colleagues, which we'll unpack that a little more as we get into our collaborative XR formats for design reviews.

      But as you mentioned, Gary, this is a project you did back in 2017, 2018, where the hardware, I mean, it was still great at the time, but as we've seen, every year it keeps rapidly getting more comfortable, easier to use. This takes us to where we are today as really looking at extended reality is a real business tool that we look at very similarly to the rest of our devices. And so that's what we're going to start talking about a little bit here is the overview, is what is XR as a business tool and how do we scale this to our teams in an effective way.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, so let's start by just taking a look at the current state of these headsets. Just like Austin has said, they've come so far just in the past few years. This is the current state of where we are. And at Autodesk, we feel like the Meta Quest line is really a high-quality line of headsets. You have a few options here that we're going to talk through. But at this point in 2023, this is as good as VR gets. So starting with the Meta Quest 2, and Gary's got a lot of experience with the Meta Quest 2. Maybe can you just overview your experience of what you've seen on the Quest 2?

      GARY COWAN: Yeah, we recently about a year or two ago, we looked at the Quest 2 platform when the headsets launched. Originally, we purchased tethered headsets and Rifts, as you said, way back in 2017. These standalone headsets were literally just a dream at that stage to be able to render binocular decent 1080p screens, needed quite a big graphics card at the time and quite a hefty processor. So any time we wanted to use or demonstrate VR, it was quite a large desktop PC that you were having to transport around.

      And especially if you're catching airplanes and flying to places, it was quite cumbersome. So when they released the Meta Quest 2, it was phenomenal to be able to have that same fidelity in your pocket, basically, and have it on the go. Now, there's not as much horsepower in that headset as would be a tethered device. But what we found was that by segmenting our models and making our models a bit smaller, it unlocked the possibility of everyone having access to these anywhere, as long as they have a stable internet connection.

      So there's a bit of compromise, but as with everything technologically-driven, this is going to change as time progresses. We're eagerly awaiting the release of the Meta Quest 3. Unfortunately, we don't get the privilege that you guys have of having NDI headsets early, but certainly, we will be getting one of these on day one. And if the tech sheets are to be believed, then there's going to be a significant increase in GP processing power that's about 1.7 times is what they've said.

      So I'm hoping that's going to have a real-world reflecting, allowing us to render slightly bigger models. The Quest Pro, again, is a brilliant headset, but for us as a business, it was almost overkill. We don't really need the augmented reality aspect of it. Although as we spoke about before, I do believe that mixed reality and augmented reality will be the future of construction and site-based headset wearing in time to come. But certainly, in the present day, I would totally agree with you that the Quest 3 would probably be the best bang-for-buck headset that you could buy on the market at the moment.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, I would say having firsthand experience with all three of these headsets, there are a few things I would tip you into. Number one, the Quest 2 is a great headset. It's tried and true at this point. It's been around for a while. The Quest 3 is a higher-end version of this where you have more power and, yeah, this advanced color passthrough experience, which the hand-tracking is amazing, the resolution of the screen is really amazing.

      The Quest Pro, what you're getting with the Quest Pro above that Quest 3, is really fit. It does fit better on your head. The way the design sits on the top of your head and sort of cranks down over, you don't kind of have the same forward pull that the Quest 3 or the Quest 2 does, where it's really the weight is primarily in the front of the headset. With the Quest Pro because also the battery is in the back, the weight is evenly distributed on your head, and those ergonomics are really what you're getting with this high-end headset.

      So bottom line is if you want the best of the best and you don't mind paying $1,000 for it, go the Quest Pro. But at this point, again, in 2023, post-launch of Quest 3, I really recommend the Quest 3 as an excellent mid-price-point high-quality device. Standalone, just like Gary said, and this is really key that standalone means you don't need a computer to run these devices, you just put them on and go. And this is really a key usability benefit and accessibility benefit for getting new people in.

      Let's talk a little bit about how to manage a fleet of these devices. A lot of people early on, even just acquiring XR, they're having to convince their IT teams that how does a VR headset even work on my network, how am I going to manage these, what's the security like. There are so many questions that come up. I encourage you to talk to us about it and we can help provide some of those answers to you.

      But the biggest thing just to get everyone on board with the basic idea of VR is honestly, it's just another mobile device for your network. And the way, if you're not familiar with this term MDM, it stands for mobile Device Manager, and this is a very common thing in large and midsize businesses. Basically, it's a software where you manage a fleet of devices, and you can roll out updates to the devices, you can remote lock, remote wipe them. And this is a common way that we manage fleets of devices in enterprises.

      VR is no different. So with the Meta line, you have Quest for Business. You have actually a few options of MDMs that you can use, even like VMware or Workspace ONE you can use with it. So for your IT team, you can just introduce this as it's not a fundamentally new concept, you're just building this as another mobile device on your network just like your androids or iPhones and so on, and you can manage them in a very similar way. So not a lot of pain there. You just have to get on board with the basic concepts.

      All right, so let's talk about level-setting expectations. And this is a big part of it honestly, bringing XR into your firm is just communicating to different groups, communicating to the executive staff what is XR, what are the benefits of it, what are the problems we're solving, how do I manage these devices, and so on. It's important to just start with, I mean, though just like Gary said, a lot of us came to XR because of our love for gaming, XR is not just for gaming.

      There is real utility, real value that you can create here in this business use case, and it's fun. Honestly, it's great. It's a new and interesting and exciting opportunity to interact with your content in a way that feels more resonant for a lot of people. And so it's important to lead with this idea of XR really as a productivity and collaboration benefit.

      Second up, spatial computing allows us to really engage and experience content that wouldn't otherwise be immersive. And so really just understanding and level setting that the purpose here is to walk a building before it's built. Something like an immensely complicated project, like that Claridge's project, there's a tremendous value in these high-stakes scenarios. Also where you're planning for an event which is time-boxed and the level of errors is very small, you can rehearse that in XR and make sure that it's just right and your plan is all locked down in a way that is really powerful.

      And last, it's important to acknowledge that really we're building a new skill here, and it takes patience, patience with yourself, patience with your team to say we're introducing a new technology and there's going to be a little bit of training of just understanding how it works. Gary, I'm curious for you at Kane, what's that process been about like skill growth on just getting your VR legs, understanding how the controllers work, and so on?

      GARY COWAN: Yeah, it's literally just one-to-one training is what we found to be the best. It's very hard trying to teach a group of people to do it. So generally, when someone wants to learn and experience VR, I kind of take them almost by the hand and guide them through their first experience, let them spend a bit of time getting used to the controls and explaining the buttons. In the end, really you just allow them to play with it and let them have free rein.

      So I kind of just sit back there in the room and let them play with it for half an hour, and watch them as they navigate and make sure that they're not walking into the wall or falling over or anything silly like that, and that they're aware of their space. And a lot of people are more comfortable sitting down. I find it's easier to sit down. Some people prefer to stand. You just get them really comfortable. And then it's just a regular check-in then with everyone to see are you using the platform, is there any problem with the technology, anything we can just to keep the focus on using the technology and not letting it sort of slip.

      And also, with our wider design teams and the projects that we're in, a lot of our tier 1 contractors that we work for at the moment, we're actively engaging with them to try and push the technology into design team meetings and try and change the whole format of how design teams come together. We're breaking the mold really of the traditional teams called what used to be in face-to-face. Five years ago, we used to have to get on a plane and fly to the site.

      And then during the pandemic, it was COVID, so it was a Teams calls and Zoom calls. And now, I do believe that we should all be meeting in VR. We should all meet virtually on-site and walk the entire site, and record all of our issues using ACC tools that are available.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, thanks. Let's dive actually a little bit deeper into that. So, Austin, do you want to intro us to this?

      AUSTIN BAKER: Yeah, it's been really helpful to hear up to this point about the different options of hardware out there and how to approach that relationship with this technology from a professional standpoint. But as Gary was alluding to some of those ways that we can do those design reviews, let's take a second to talk about what are the logistical steps we actually need to get into an immersive experience like this and to create a great comfortable first experience, maybe whether it's getting one of those first Quest 3's for our team internally, or maybe it's shipping one of those $300 Quest 2s to a client across the world that we still want to bring them in and make it effortless for them to get in. Let's jump into that.

      GABE PAEZ: All right, so let's just talk about this first experience of deploying a new headset. It's going to start with making sure that the new user has a Meta account. Now, this depends on if you're using the consumer version, you're building like a default Meta account. One of the questions here is often when Meta first launched, there was this dependency on a Facebook account, and a lot of people really there was a lot of blowback to that, to be quite honest.

      There's no longer that dependency. Now you have these decoupled Meta accounts. And there is even a Meta for Work account that then can use SSO through your common SSO provider. So there are different levels for different types of businesses and individuals, but you want to get started by just having a way to authenticate into the headset, number one. And again, this is really no different than, again, iOS or Android where you're logging in on Android with your Google account, iOS with you've got, what's it called? Your iCloud account, or your Apple ID, whatever.

      And then you can also lock those in with SSO to your work. So again, a lot of these, even at the device level, the account management, a lot of the fundamentals have been taken from mobile computing directly into the VR headsets. Next, and this is one of the differences, you're going to choose an avatar in the space. This will allow you to be represented inside of a collaborative environment.

      And then, of course, we're talking about Workshop XR, which is our just-announced new product, new XR collaboration product from Autodesk. And we'll be highlighting this more and more as we go from here. But we encourage you to install Workshop XR and then use that as your tool for collaboration. So now get that headset out to the employee, the new user, and that's what they can use to get started. So let's dive next though into a little bit more detail around what Gary was just talking about, which is that first-user experience.

      So this is how to take someone, and just a few tips we have for how to take a brand-new person who's maybe never been in VR, or maybe they were in VR in 2017 in like a Google Cardboard, and so they had like an early experience but haven't been in since. OK, so what do we really recommend and a few tips for making this a positive experience for them?

      So number one, when they're standing there in front of you, talk with them about what they're about to experience. I'm going to put this headset on you. You're going to see, you're going to be able to look around, you can even stand up if you want, but this is the experience you're about to have. Right? It's important to prepare them mentally for what they're about to experience.

      Second up, we recommend for a person's first experience, even though these headsets, you can put them on, you can stand up, you can walk around, for someone's first experience, we recommend seated in a swivel chair. Seated because it's just more comfortable and they're grounded, and so they're not going to run off because they get so excited or run into a wall. [LAUGHS] Swivel chair because this is part of the magic of XR is you want that mobility to be able to turn around and look behind you, look in front of you, and so a swivel chair really gives you that freedom.

      All right, so start by putting that headset on their head. And I'm just actually going to try to demonstrate this for you what I recommend. So this is a Quest 2. This is what it looks like. When I'm putting a headset on someone, generally opening it all the way up to the last setting-- sorry, this is a little weird with the camera-- but extending it up and then putting it on their face directly like this first, and then the back down.

      So this is generally the most comfortable. A lot of people try to put it on like a baseball cap where they put it on the back and then rip it down, and especially if they're wearing glasses, it's just awkward. It's a weird experience. And then their glasses get all crazy in their face. Generally, if you can bring it just like this onto their head, it's a comfortable experience, it's approaching them, then the display comes on, and it's a magical first moment where the display comes on, and they're suddenly in an immersive environment.

      So that is a really key moment, and I encourage you to just practice that. So then have them position the headset up and down, and usually, what I would say is like till it's not blurry. Sometimes, people, it's a little bit down on their face and they'll be seeing a blurry image. If they just position it in a comfortable place and then you can crank it down, that generally has the best results.

      OK, next up. Placing the controllers in their hands. So first of all, do this after the headset. So headset first, make sure it's comfortable, now give them a controller one at a time. And when you place it in their hands, make sure that you're giving them the right controller for the right hand, and that you're putting it in the right orientation, and that then you place their hands in the right position.

      Because a lot of people grab the controllers and they'll grab it like this, and then they don't know where the buttons are, or they'll grab it like this, or it's upside down and they can't figure it out. You can really help them a lot by just putting it in the position, putting their hand, their finger on the trigger, putting their finger on this trigger, showing them where the buttons are, and it just eases out those first few moments. So now they're holding two controllers in the right position with the right hand grip, and they're ready for their experience.

      OK, next up. So actually, it's funny. Like even in this image you're seeing here, this is somebody outside of VR that just put this headset on. And what we recommend is actually don't do this, where you're sort of over someone's shoulder from outside of VR and trying to guide them through because you can't really see what they're seeing, and it can be really challenging.

      Ideally, the best case scenario is if you have someone else in another headset in VR, or you go get in another headset, put yourself in VR, and then go into a collaborative environment so that you're in VR talking to them, showing them controllers, moving around and guiding them from inside the App, versus physically guiding them from the space where you can't see what they're seeing.

      So this is a real key element. Have your guide inside VR with them. Workshop XR has a lot of tools for guiding people through a space. You can use like hosting tools, like Gathering, and Go-to, and to be able to help orchestrate, and move someone through the environment. One key point here is that we put optional on the controllers in their hands. If that's somebody that's just brand new and doesn't need to control the space, don't give them controllers.

      Just sit them down, put the headset on, and then guide them through the experience by teleporting them around by gathering them to you, rather than trying to teach them how to teleport and move themselves through the space. So this is a real key thing as well. You don't have to give them controllers if you're concerned about teaching them all of those skills right out of the gate.

      This one is key, especially for someone's first experience. Too short is better than too long. You want them to have a good first experience and come out of the headset saying God that was fast, I want more, I want to come back, versus putting them in for a really long time and them getting exhausted honestly. And then last, there are a few great apps. If you don't want to put them directly into the App, we recommend this app, First Steps, which helps guide them through how to use the controllers, and it's playful and fun.

      You don't always have time to do this. Sometimes you do need to throw them-- you're in a design review and this is their first experience, and then you want them inside of the App itself. But if you have time to really introduce someone in your firm, I recommend this app. Anything you want to add to this, Gary, or, Austin?

      GARY COWAN: I think the First Steps app was my first experience in VR. And it wasn't First Steps is the newer one. It was actually the older one that was called First Contact which was the original one on the Rift. And for someone that was born in the 80s, it was perfect. It literally was perfect. It was very nostalgic. It's set in the 80s. You know, there's VCR tips, and there's old-school electronics, and this cool robot that you get to meet. It's very sort of Johnny 5-esque.

      And for me, it was amazing. It really just opened my eyes to the whole technology. And as I said before, that was me bought. I was hook, line, and sinker. That was me playing VR every night and wondering, how do I use this for work? But yeah, it's always best to have a gentle introduction to VR because I have seen quite a lot of people have motion sickness and injure themselves getting scared or falling over, or just not enjoying the experience, and then that puts them off for future use. And I always try and make sure that everyone enjoys it and uses it. You don't want anyone not enjoying it and not using it for that reason.

      AUSTIN BAKER: And I think one comment to summarize there as we're bringing people in for their first time is just reiterating no matter what their experience is or comfort with any sort of emerging technology like this is that number one, it's a very easy learning curve for the actual input of these interactions. And number two, it's not quite as physical as we may think it requires. Some of the games require a lot of moving around.

      But when it comes to productivity in business tools, we're really just pointing and clicking with subtle movements. And a lot of first-time users find that it's just so intuitive to look around, to just walk by pushing one button. And it's almost deceptively easy of how much data we consume in interactions in those first experiences because of the kinesthetic nature of VR. So that's just helpful as a reminder if someone has any hesitation going in.

      GABE PAEZ: Thanks, Austin. Yeah, so your first step on the data side is relatively straightforward. Honestly, you just need your content inside of ACC. So updating your project files, pushing your project files no matter whatever design tool you're using into ACC. And we do, of course, just like working in any tool, encourage you to keep things clean and organized.

      And good BIM data hygiene is important even inside of VR where you're accessing all this data and going to be pulling it up, so making sure you've got your 3D views laid out, and making sure the properties themselves are accurate, and all of your versions are up to date. So you can create a workshop from any one of these files, and in real-time, you can pull any of these files into a workshop inside of Workshop XR.

      And so this is really part of the simplicity and the magic that Workshop XR creates is just this direct access to all of these files inside of ACC. And so we encourage you to take advantage of that, and then just share the workshop directly there from Workshop XR with your collaborators that are going to be joining in with you. OK, so next up, we're going to dive into, Austin, do you want to walk us through just the logistics of getting the workshop set up?

      AUSTIN BAKER: So as Gabe mentioned, once we've identified what those Revit or Navisworks projects are in our common cloud data environment, Autodesk Construction Cloud, we literally just have to assign a name for the new workshop we want to join, connects that Revit or Navisworks file, and then from there, we can simply just click to launch this workshop straight on our connected headset that we've paired to this.

      We cannot overemphasize how simple this workflow is and how much this changes how people previously would get into VR experiences where they would have to manually download the model, make sure it was the right version, upload it back into VR. And there's a lot of time killed in between as we're getting those versions up to date. So with Workshop XR, we have this live connected data from ACC. As changes are pushed in from Revit or Navisworks, they're also pushed to the workshop that we're joining into.

      So to summarize what we've just talked about. We've recognized that they're pretty easy steps to get prepared for these experiences. We can take one of our models and maybe we've set up some predefined issues or viewpoints that we want to walk through. But let's now discuss what are the different formats of which we could have a productive XR design review, maybe whether it's hybrid, remote, or collaboration, or both. Let's jump into it.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, so we're going to talk through three different formats today and the unique aspects of each one. So let's go ahead and start with remote design reviews. So this is probably the most straightforward, and honestly, I would say one of the best experiences. So this is when every person has a headset and they are not in the same physical location. So they don't necessarily have to be across the city. I mean, honestly you could be in different conference rooms within the same building.

      But these are design reviews where you're not physically collocated in the same room. So bottom line, you're going to create a calendar event and assign a workshop for that meeting that you're going to have. So anyone inside of the headset can then join inside of that workshop from wherever they are, whether they're in the same building, or across the world. And, of course, they can still join in desktop, so in the desktop application if they don't have access to a headset.

      But still everyone is joining from the App itself, not from Zoom, or Teams, or in a conference room with you. Now, we do recommend though even in this format if you're going to record the session or if you're going to share it with non-active participants, you can start a screen share from usually the host.

      So whoever is hosting the design review, their headset could be shared to a screen, which then is streamed via Teams, or Zoom, or recorded for later use. So this is the most simple and clear because everyone is joining Inside of the space, everyone has audio chat inside of the space, you can move everyone around on an equal level, everyone has access to the tools, and so on. So this is by far, what we would recommend if possible if you can get everyone to join in this format. It's the simplest.

      But another very common format is going to be an on-site design review. So this is going to be generally in a conference room. It's with multiple people located in a conference room together. And sometimes this takes the form of only one headset where you have one person in headset. Sometimes there are going to be multiple people in headset. We recommend, again, especially if you have new users, swivel chairs in this format.

      We definitely, just actually, we saw an image in Gary's slides of an on-site design review, which was, I think, the image was two people in a space and they both had large screens, projected screens. And so that's exactly what we're saying here. Make sure in this format, especially if there are non-VR participants, that you're projecting the headset display onto a big screen, whether it's a projector, or just like a conference room display.

      And there are two ways you can do this. Either you can cast the headset view onto the display so that everyone is seeing the first-person point of view of what that person is seeing in VR, or you can use the desktop application to run as a separate participant in this space. So this is a third-person experience where everyone in the space is looking at a desktop view, and then you have people in VR that are moving around.

      The desktop viewer is a better experience for everyone inside of the space because there's less motion. Anyone in VR is going to be looking around and moving around. And watching a screen of somebody in VR like that can be a little bit disorienting and odd. If you have the desktop view casting to the screen, you get more stability in the frame. You can still have somebody control and move it through the space, but it's a gentler viewing experience. And so largely, we would recommend that.

      Now one important piece here is that everyone needs to be muted in the App. You have this redundant audio if you can hear each other in the space, and also, it's being streamed through the App just like if multiple people are on Teams in a conference room, you need to mute the Teams, right? So these are just a few aspects of this use case. Gary, is there anything to add from your experience doing this at Claridge's or in other projects?

      GARY COWAN: Yeah, I think you've really covered it all there. I mean, that's what we sort of organically found ourselves from trial and error of using the technologies and different use cases. Not everyone enjoys VR, unfortunately. Some people just can't use a headset and suffer from bad motion sickness, or just even with age perhaps. They're maybe just too set in their ways and they're older, and they don't really want to try these newfangled things. So it's great to have the option of both the desktop here and the mobile headset. I prefer option one, everybody in the headset because it's the most immersive way of doing it, and I find it's easier.

      As you say, some people watch a projected screen, and because the motion is so fast, they really lose quite a lot of what's been shown because they can't really see it because people are moving their head really quickly and glancing very quickly with no perception. And it actually, the movement is much more pronounced on a 2D screen than the head turn, just whatever way the screen works. But, yeah, it's definitely I think everyone should experiment with the best way of using VR and just try and find what's best suited for each individual.

      AUSTIN BAKER: And just to piggyback and reiterating what Gary said earlier is that you can still have people participating equally immersed in these reviews if they are looking at that projector or screen. And just as a pro tip as some food for thought if you are using some sort of application that has a desktop viewer, some firms find that using some sort of USB controller that's button-mapped to the inputs of the keyboard actually allows for smoother flythroughs. Whether you're panning or booming with both joysticks at the same time, it almost creates a drone experience of flying through here to make it feel like a very polished presentation from that desktop point of view.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, good point. I mean, this orchestration of the 2D screen and a VR experience is really magical for different people who have different preferences. So it's a great experience if done right. It just takes some preparation. Now, one of the hardest formats to pull off is going to be a hybrid. So this is going to be where you have somebody in VR that's remote, and then you also have people within a room. So what you're seeing here in the image is this guy is in a room with others, and then also he's speaking to someone who is remote and off-site.

      Now, the trickiest thing here is just the audio how to make sure that the person in VR can hear everyone inside of the space and vice versa as well. So what we recommend generally in this case is to run a simultaneous Zoom or Meet call and just do the audio through there, and then to just allow the spatial interaction of the people either in VR or on the screen to take place inside of the space.

      It's just in our experience, this is the best way to pull off this complicated format. It's not optimal, but you then have the benefit at least, you just don't want audio getting in the way of what you need to discuss. And bottom line with any of these technologies, the point isn't the technology itself, it's the design review. We need to make sure that the focus is put on what we're actually reviewing.

      And so audio is the first thing that can get in the way if not done properly, and so you have to plan for where is my audio going to come from and making sure that everyone can hear properly to be able to facilitate the conversation. What else do I want to say about this one? I guess that's it. Let's move forward.

      AUSTIN BAKER: Great, so that's helpful to hear all the different methods of where we could be joining in from. For the sake of time, let's kind of rapidly move through this next section here of showing what does an experience in XR actually feel like from the point of view of the types of data that we can interact with in that space and how it feels to have our colleagues in there. Let's just walk through this and give some live narration through it.

      GABE PAEZ: Sounds good. OK, so first of all, what's it like inside of these spaces? Well, you start inside of a workshop. You can see each other. You can talk to each other. And the model is in a Scale Model Mode. So it's living on this tabletop, you can move it around, you can scale it, and you can scan through your environment. This Scale Model Mode is really powerful for an overview of the project and really gives you context before you dive into one-to-one mode.

      Now, when you're in one-to-one, you can just walk through this space as if this building was finally built and have a natural experience of moving the group through the space. You can do this by teleporting or just smooth locomotion like you're seeing here. Once you're inside of that space, you can point at any object and inspect the BIM properties associated with that object. So finding ways to just uncover that layer beneath what you're seeing, and a lot of that is just through access to this data.

      Sometimes, you need to toggle layers to get at the data that you're actually interested in. So looking through the model browser and toggling on and off walls or specific equipment that isn't necessary for the context of what you're trying to view will really allow you the flexibility to orchestrate and focus everyone's attention on the context that you're trying to portray in this moment of your design review.

      So if you have a host of issues that are already tracked in this model, they will automatically show up inside of Workshop XR, and all you have to do is pull them up in your console and click Go-to to teleport yourself to this issue. Once you're down at the issue location, then you can gather everyone to your location. And this is a great way to sequence your whole team through moment to moment, from one issue to the next issue to the next issue to review where we are sequentially.

      AUSTIN BAKER: So we've jumped through at one-to-one scale, we've brought our colleagues through for these immersive walkthroughs and it's also great to see that we can connect the ACC data into the workshop. But how do we take action items out of our walkthroughs into here? What do we do to actually track the observations in our design reviews and move it forward through the rest of our project lifecycle?

      GABE PAEZ: So maybe the most important thing is to make sure we're tracking these action items in context. So you'll do that with the Create Issue tool, first choosing the type of issue that you want to track, and then just pointing at where you want to place this issue in the physical space and actually tracking that issue. You can also track a non-placed issue directly in the console with that Create Issue button and really this just gives you the power to track these action items in the context of this VR design review that will then live into the next stage.

      You can manage existing issues in a way whether you're assigning due dates, assigning them to an individual, changing the description, all of this is possible and easy with voice-to-text transcription. Basically, all of this data is at your fingertips, and you can manipulate it directly from virtual reality And then, of course, post-meeting you have all of this data directly in ACC to complete the life cycle.

      And in ACC, you have a full record of when this issue was tracked, where it was tracked from VR who tracked it, when it was assigned, and so on. And ultimately, then you can act on these issues, resolve them over time, and ultimately, those resolutions, it's all what we're after, moving this project forward, and getting to the actual final design delivery

      AUSTIN BAKER: So taking what would have been multiple back-and-forth meetings, emails, information lost in translation, we just meet in person in a couple minutes, find those issues, connect it back in with ACC, and that is really slimming down how we even think about design reviews, and just brings our decision-making forward a lot faster. So it's helpful to see that workflow. We're now going to close off with some of our best practices of some tips as we're going through these, and any other closing comments before we wrap up here.

      GABE PAEZ: Yeah, so just a couple quick tips we want to leave you with. Number one, just make sure that you're doing a test run before your design review, that you know how your audio is going to run, you know what the format is, and that it's optimal for your group to focus on the work that needs to be done. Make sure you're defaulting to this in-app audio. Just like Gary said, the best experience is this remote design review of everyone joining Inside of the space if you can.

      And I encourage you to try to lean toward that as you acquire more headsets and get your group comfortable working in VR. Try to keep those early sessions short, but honestly, we see sessions now, once people get used to this format, they extend longer and longer because they're more comfortable talking in this way that they can spend time really focusing on what needs to be done, track action items.

      But in the beginning, be patient with yourself. Work up to those longer if you need to have a full hour or 90-minute meeting, work up to that over time. Try to keep your first session short and sweet. Use that Gather feature to really help facilitate, especially new users through VR. That assistance, you guiding them, them feeling safe inside of the space, that's going to go a long way to creating an excellent experience for them. And use Issues. That's really the output, and we want to make sure that we're capturing the output of this meeting to really make it effective and high quality.

      So getting started has honestly never been simpler. We encourage you to just get some headsets, get comfortable inside of the space, and just get practiced working in VR together. Thank you for attending the session. Anything you want to leave them with, Gary? Hot tips from Kane Group?

      GARY COWAN: Yes, don't be scared of it. You know, a lot of people are quite wary of it. It's certainly not anything to be scared of. And as I've already covered, the cost of this technology now is so low, that there is no drawbacks to this technology that I can really see now. When I started this six or seven years ago, there was quite a sharp shock at the start. You had to spend quite a lot of money to get this technology.

      Whereas today, it's very affordable, it's very easy to use, it's very easily deployable and managed with the system. So for me, it's a win-win. I can only tell everyone that's listening that we have had great success with the system, and I look forward to seeing where this is going to go. I do believe that mixed reality will be the future for headsets in the future, and I'm eager to see the technology progress over the coming years.

      AUSTIN BAKER: Wonderful. Thank you, Gary, thank you, Gabe, for sharing your time with us here. And, of course, thank you for those of you attending this session virtually for tuning in on how we can bring these design reviews into extended reality. We'll be sending you our follow-up information for a little more in-depth details of these best practices here. As well, feel free to reach out if you have any questions of the Autodesk XR team. We're really looking forward to seeing how you can shape how you collaborate using tools like Workshop XR. So thank you, again, and we'll look forward to seeing you next year.