How to Wow – Extending BIM into Virtual Reality for every project

TOM HUGHES: The key word for today's presentation is storytelling. I love this graphic. The complexity of a good story is really depicted here.

When I was training to be a civil engineer, words like storytelling and design narrative were not part of the agenda. Emerging technology, virtual reality, and maximum interactive allows us to tell more compelling stories.

So I'm Tom Hughes. I work for Mott MacDonald. I'm a senior consultant with the VR digital leadership team. I've 10 years experience. And really, it's all about helping projects to be successful.

I'm an infrastructure BIM guy, so Civil 3D and InfraWorks. I focus on the collaborative management of information. The last year or so, I've been working with Toby and Lionel in extending some of those workflows and using BIM to our clients.

A little fact about myself, I once cooked a crawfish boil for 800 people, which was slightly less scary than this.

[LAUGHTER]

And I've got to say, I was so impressed by the presentation Skanksa gave on the main stage during the technology keynote yesterday. I'm maybe a little bit jealous, but relieved I wasn't on that stage. But also, great minds think alike. We're not going to be the only company doing VR. And we've got the opportunity to show you some of our experiences live in this forum, so you'll see actually what we've been doing, not only how we've been delivering them.

I don't know if any of the University of Amsterdam students are in here today, but I met them at lunch yesterday and I was really impressed with their enthusiasm for this kind of technology. And at such a young age, they were already fully aware of what VR could be doing for construction. So I think a real sign of the future.

TOBY FOOT: Hi, I'm Toby, project specialist at Mott MacDonald. Like Tom, I've also got 10 years industry experience. So before becoming a project specialist early this year, I had over 10 years experience as a BIM technician specializing in Revit and Civil3D.

And now part of my role as a project specialist is leading the development of our immersive technology. So that's the gamification of BIM models and VR like we're going to show you today. And a little fact about myself is, I'm a king gamer, hence all this stuff. But since becoming a dad last year and the pressures of the new job, I don't have any chance to play the massive amount of games I've accrued over my years. Lionel.

LIONEL GRAF: Hi, I'm Lionel Graf, so I'm part of visual consulting. So I help Toby and Tom on this particular project. So at Autodesk Consulting, I'm leading a small team of visualization specialists in Europe. And yeah.

So basically, game engines, 3ds Max Interactives, Stingray, it's the same. 3ds Max, Maya, VRED, so a lot of solutions. So our mission is basically to help our customer get their head around all the technology we have at Autodesk, how we can leverage that to take the most of it, and yeah. Find the right value for the right purpose, and support the challenges that we may-- or our customer like Tom and Toby may face.

TOM HUGHES: So Lionel is going to be the one that answers all of yours questions later. So this class is titled, How to Wow. So we've already discussed about using virtual reality to extend traditional BIM workflows. Linking back to the key word for this presentation is really a story about how we've done all the work with Autodesk to develop a repeatable process to allow us to use virtual reality on every project.

One of the things that we were very aware of with virtual reality was, we didn't want something that was just off the peg. And we didn't want something that was just a one-use solution. So it's one of the main reasons why we work with Autodesk to think about how we could do something that was a continually-developing template. We're going to show a bit of that as we go through today.

So a little bit about Mott MacDonald, only one slide. We're an employer and engineering management and development consultancy. We focus our expertise through global business sectors to make a difference on big issues. You can see the scale of our business there. So about 16,000 employees globally.

Let's cover our class learning objectives, because that's why you're here. Objective one is to explain how VR can wow stakeholders, bring design to life, and tell compelling narratives and add value to all project types. Objective two is to use Autodesk Max Interactive, Revit Live, 3ds Max, and InfraWorks 360 to create your own virtual reality experience. Objective three, if you're going to do objective two, is to follow some basic tips and tricks to optimize your models for use downstream in VR. Finally, objective four, to understand the key VR concepts including hardware selection, user interface, locomotion, and model performance.

So let's look at the agenda. Number one, we're going to look at our first steps using Stingray. Number two, we're going to look at the challenges that we faced. Number three, we're going to look at the success that we've had. And finally, four, we're going to give you some tips, tricks, and future plans of what we might be working on with Lionel next year.

So if I was an Autodesk employee, I'd be talking about a safe harbor statement here. There's absolutely nothing in this presentation that you can't share with your colleagues, and we really encourage you to do so. But COA is covering our ass.

So we are going to be doing live VR models. They may not work. They definitely will, because Lionel's been working tirelessly this week to get them up to scratch.

Also, when we first started this journey, Max Interactive was called Stingray. And quite often, we use the terms interchangeably. Don't feel confused when we say Stingray. What we really mean is Max Interactive.

Finally, the only other caveat about this presentation is the 90 frames per second that Toby will receive in his head-mounted display is not the same as we can mirror onto the screen. So don't be put off by any lag in the experience here, because what Toby's experiencing is much smoother, much more intuitive.

So let's start with part one, our first steps using Autodesk Stingray. Our journey with Lionel actually started two years ago at Autodesk University 2015. I attended a small class about something called Project Expo, which later became Revit Live.

So transportation, how people get from A to B, is of critical importance and a key issue within society. One of the projects that Mott MacDonald are currently working on is the Crossrail line in London. As part of the Crossrail strategy, all of the stations among a route are being upgraded so they're an access-for-all station providing step-free access from curb to platform.

Oh. Went too far. Sorry.

So one of the reasons that we wanted to look at a project such as one of these stations was that it had a lift in it, which is an interesting asset from a game design perspective. We've got something that we've designed as a fixed solid in Revit, but we want to make it move and we want to have some interaction with, some buttons.

I'm going to let Toby give you a demo about what we did with Stingray now. This isn't using the VR. It's just with a simple Xbox controller. But you'll start to see some of the key concepts that we'll build into later in the presentation.

TOBY FOOT: Can I?

TOM HUGHES: Yeah.

TOBY FOOT: So for this experience, we used an Xbox controller. I think it's not open. Oh, no, there it is. Sorry.

TOM HUGHES: First live demo, going well.

TOBY FOOT: Yeah. So I just light it up here?

TOM HUGHES: Yeah.

TOBY FOOT: Nearly there. Is that coming across all right on the screen? Oh, the PowerPoint's still running.

TOM HUGHES: Yeah.

TOBY FOOT: So.

TOM HUGHES: OK.

TOBY FOOT: Huh. Are we there now?

TOM HUGHES: No, we've still got the PowerPoint slide on the screen.

TOBY FOOT: That's weird.

TOM HUGHES: Is it open twice?

TOBY FOOT: Oh, yeah. And we're back to the desktop now. Good. Sorry about that. Cool.

TOM HUGHES: OK, success.

TOBY FOOT: So here we go. I'll maximize that so you can see it better. So this is our station model. And you can see we've added some context that was just a basic InfraWorks model.

And I can change between different modes, which you can see down at the bottom left. So I'm now in the fly mode. So you can fly down, fly around wherever I want to go.

And here's the lift, the access-for-all lift. So I'll pop into first person mode. And you can see our guy walking here. Approach the lift.

And now we've got this toggle here where you can change your height of the player, and at low height, it changes into wheelchair user. And so we can-- I'll zoom in a bit there into the lift. And you can see the graphical fidelity, and Stingray is really good. Nice reflections and bump maps on the materials.

Wait for the lift. And you can see that the lights even work on the lift. There we go. We've made it to the platform.

TOM HUGHES: And we've made it through our first live demo.

TOBY FOOT: Yeah.

TOM HUGHES: Thanks, Toby.

TOBY FOOT: OK.

TOM HUGHES: I will just change the clicker as well.

TOBY FOOT: Oh, yeah.

TOM HUGHES: Back where we started. Great.

TOBY FOOT: Good.

TOM HUGHES: Do you want to talk about how we built the lift?

TOBY FOOT: Oh, yeah.

TOM HUGHES: Yeah.

TOBY FOOT: So as you saw in that demo there, we had an animated lift. So this scenario with the train station, the access-for-all scheme gave us a good opportunity to try out some animated assets. So we created the lift in 3ds Max, and created the animations there as well.

And actually, it was all one long animation. And then we can chop it up when we bring it into Stingray, which is what you see down the bottom there. And then we create the logic for how the lift works, which is what you can see here. So that's like, lift goes up, open doors, pause. And how it works with calling the lift when it's at the bottom or top, all that logic.

And there's also-- you can't see it, but there's a trigger box in front of the door. So when you approach, it'll detect that you're there, like a real lift has sensors. And you can see that we even had working lights included in the Max model there.

So I'm not a coder at all. I don't understand any of that side of things. But that doesn't mean I can't code in Stingray-- 3ds Max Interactive-- because it uses a visual language called Flow which is based on LUA behind the scenes.

But this is how it looks with-- you've got nodes, and you string them all together to create the logic you want. So get the functionality. So this is the flow nodes that control the lift. And you can see, we've got boxes around groups of nodes.

And that doesn't actually affect how it works, how it functions. It's just really good practice when you're doing these Flow nodes to remind yourself which bit does what. So otherwise, when it gets complex, there will be hundreds of these things. It's a big-- lot of spaghetti.

TOM HUGHES: So I want to have a really quick look at our basic user interface within our early Stingray projects. So to begin with, we obviously needed to include some of our Mott MacDonald branding. And you can see that from 2015 to 2017, we've actually changed our brand logo.

And we've obviously got some product information. We've got, effectively, our player selection. We've got details about control. So not only can you use the Stingray model with the Xbox controller, you can also use basic WASD interface on a keyboard.

Then we've got the locomotion mode, so the fly-through, the walking grade. And we also introduced a bit of functionality to allow you to time how long it takes to get from curb to platform to give a better idea of how long it would take wheelchair users to get around the station. So thinking about some of the design challenges, and introducing those into our game's UI.

This is really early work, so you kinda look back now two years later and go, ugh. Looks ugly. But at the time, we were working quite hard, and I think we did a reasonably good job.

So what about the outcomes of that very first engagement working with Lionel and Autodesk Consulting? Well, eagle-eyed people among you will notice that the rendered image that we had in the original slide that we repeated here is a slightly different configuration than the game that Toby was playing. The model that we put in our live workflow is depicted by the schematic on top, and we had a 90-degree entrance and exit with the doors.

One of the insights of working in live and experiencing the design as a wheelchair user was how difficult it was to negotiate that 90-degree turn inside the confines of the elevator. Working with designers, that allowed the lift configuration to be changed to 180 through and through, which meant extending the canopy but giving a much better experience for the wheelchair users we're trying to help.

So in terms of those first steps, what were the lessons that we learned? Well, that Max Interactive extends the potential of BIM models. I think, undoubtedly, we can see that's true.

It's great for communicating design intent to people who might not have ever used BIM before. We got great feedback from our client. We learned a new set of skills. We had reusable template, so when we switch out the Revit model behind that, we can use the same functionality in any of our models. We also started to get to grips with things like user interface, and how we can put company identity into new types of products.

So then what came next? Well, we were challenged with producing six experiences that would showcase VR technology at our 2017 company AGM. As I mentioned when I explained about Mott MacDonald, we're an employer and company, so our AGM's actually all of our most senior leaders within the business.

For someone like Toby, the opportunities to do six models in a very short period of time was really exciting. For someone like me, it was really worrying. I knew that if we didn't get it right, we were going to look like idiots, which is why we engaged with Lionel again, and have worked with Autodesk consultancy to produce the experiences.

We were also battling the fact that during 2017, the hype around VR was perhaps as big as it had ever been. Everyone wanted to see everything happening all at once. And we really had to focus on what was most effective.

So thinking about that, what sort of challenges are we going to try and deal with? We also needed simplicity. So while there was many, many challenges on the project, what we need for the user experience for our board of directors was a simple, easy-to-use solution.

But we didn't want to have something that was a one-off. We wanted something that we could build on and use in the future. So there were some key issues there.

So one of the biggest challenges early on-- although we'd been asked to produce these models for the AGM-- is actually getting buy in of the importance of VR at senior level. So it can be perceived as being expensive, time-consuming, and that we need key skilled expertise. By working with Autodesk, we were able to do, we think, a very good job of producing high-quality VR experiences without having to hire anyone else, without taking too much time, and not at high cost when you consider the outputs that we've had.

One of the things we work with Lionel is focusing on the key areas, and what differentiated our approach to virtual reality. So we can see here across this use case mapping with external and internal use-case, we've got some key areas of focus.

So the first area that we looked at with Lionel was we wanted something that was showcasing the technology to important stakeholders with a lot of business. The medium-term use case benefit from opportunities to use VR within marketing at a industry event. And then longer-term, we were really thinking about collaboration, and how we could use VR to connect teams across the globe.

So our approach to buy in was prioritize the areas of highest value, was define success, and was to identify suitable project data that we could use quickly and efficiently. By doing that, we were able to pilot quite quickly, and apply lessons learned continuously. So Toby and Lionel worked very closely to iterate their solutions. After we'd done the buy in part, we had to think about some of the things that Toby really loves-- the cool VR and the hardware.

TOBY FOOT: Mm-hm. So we had a choice when we started out on this journey between two headsets-- yeah, you can go. So let's talk about the hardware first.

So the hardware that we recommended. Most of that doesn't really matter too much. Any modern PC has everything you need except for the graphics card. So that's the most important part to consider.

So a 1080 we found to be ideal. It'll handle everything we throw at it with ease. Obviously, anything above that would be even better, but they rise in cost quite quickly. And 1060 and 1070s are OK. It was a 1070 running on here, and you'll see it's nice and smooth. But 1050 and below is right out for VR. OK.

So yeah, we had a choice between two headsets when we started out. And we purchased both of them, the Oculus, and the HTC VIVE. But at the time, the Oculus didn't have room scale, like you can see here, and didn't have the motion controllers. If any of you are not familiar with room scale, it means that I can walk around this space and it'll track the headset fully in that space, rather than just having to sit there in front of one sensor.

And another reason for picking the VIVE is the precision of the tracking. The controllers here contract to submillimeter accuracy, as these use a laser grid shining down to try to control this. They're incredibly accurate, which is ideal for engineering projects. And it was so successful, from our one VIVE, we now have 13 across the company. And it's been recognized as the standard platform that we'll use going forward for VR, at least for this first iteration.

So as you can see here with the Alienware laptop, we also wanted to be able to take the setup around. We've already used it at trade shows, at conferences like today. And so we found the Alienware 15 that has the GTX 1070 is absolutely perfect for performance. It's a little bit big to lug around, but it's got the oomph.

So we also have, as well as the mobile installations and the PCs people might develop on at their desks, like I showed you earlier, we've started to set up permanent installations in offices. So the intent of these is that visitors coming and sitting in the waiting area can just pick up the headset, try VR, see some of our models, get a good impression of the company.

And the intent there is that this isn't a guided experience. People coming in can just pick it up, put it on. And the interface is intuitive, so they immediately know how to navigate, and they don't need anyone to tell them, oh, you need to push this button, do that. OK.

So I'm going to talk to you a bit about our workflows. So a key bit of information is that us-- and I'm sure most of you-- already have a lot of excellent VR-ready content, particularly focusing on InfraWorks and Revit with Revit Live plug-in.

So there's not a lot you normally have to do, especially with Revit Live, to make your models ready for VR. But if you've got a massive modeling Revit, just simply hiding of the elements, chopping out data you don't need will really improve the performance of your model. You got any other tips for improving performance?

LIONEL GRAF: Yeah. So what you need to know, basically, is from a technical perspective, everything needs to live inside the graphic card. So you will find, probably, three main things you need to look into for improving your VR performance.

Number of object and complexity will affect the performance. Size of the texture will be something that can be a bottleneck as well. And everything that will need to be calculated by the graphic card at runtime for each frame will be as well be a challenge.

So the things like real-time shadows, particle effects, all of that will-- it's cool to have that kind of thing in design, but it costs a lot photographical. So basically, for the sign complexity, as Toby said, you can choose the right data to display. Most of the time, you don't need to have everything.

For a particular VR experience, you will probably need to take some decision. And those decisions will be helped by some object, not all the objects. So choosing the right level of complexity is a key thing.

And I would say, be aware of the weight of the object you put in VR. You can have a very complex chair, for example. If you have 1,000 of those in your scene, you can imagine that it will affect the performance.

So be aware and conscious of what you put in VR. The same as for texture. For example, you may have one texture with a very big image, very high resolution. If you don't see it, if it don't has value for the experience, prefer to reduce the size, for example.

TOM HUGHES: Thanks. So this section is about workflow, so let's look at some of the workflows we've used to take this kind of content and produce the kind of experiences we'll demo later.

TOBY FOOT: So first of all, I'll talk you through the workflow for InfraWorks models. And the best way to get your data out of InfraWorks is to use the built-in FBX Exporter. And if you're happy with your model, you can just push it straight through. It's a 3ds Max Interactive.

But if you want to add some polish and make it a better experience, you can push it into 3ds Max where you can maybe upgrade the materials, or add in some more assets-- maybe like cars, people-- and maybe upgrade those assets too to better-looking and better-suited models for VR.

And if you've got that data in 3ds Max, then it's a really simple post-process to push it straight into 3ds Max Interactive. There's a built-in tool, and it'll even live link your view, so whatever object you're looking at in 3ds Max, you'll see the same one in 3ds Max Interactive, and see how it looks in the game engine. It's a really neat feature. OK.

So I'll talk to you next about the Revit workflow. And this is an even easier task than the InfraWorks workflow thanks to the Revit Live plug-in. I'll show you a live demonstration-- hopefully it'll work-- of how that functions.

But basically, in the add-ons on Revit, there's a button that says Go Live. You click that. It sends you a model up to the cloud. And with a short amount of processing time-- and I've been speaking with some of the guys who work on Revit Live over the past few days. And I think they've brought the time down by about 10 times, so it's a really quick process now.

Once it's back from the cloud, download the file down to your PC. And then, as a nice intermediary step, you can open up that model in the live viewer and have a little play with it, see it in VR, get a preview before you actually take it to 3ds Max Interactive to create your more curated experience.

So live does all the heavy lifting. It's just working in the cloud in the background. It doesn't tie up the resources of your PC. And a really neat feature is, it's not actually taking the geometry from Revit like you'd have with InfraWorks or any other source. It's replacing those assets with assets that Autodesk have made that are better suited to VR.

So an easy one to spot is the trees in Revit, they're quite plain-looking, quite low res texture. It swaps these out for animated trees where the leaves blow in the wind and stuff. And also, those assets have level of detail.

So if you don't know what is, there's several different models. And when a tree, for instance, is far away, it'll have far less polygons. And as you approach it, the polygon count will go up. You don't see this-- it's like a seamless translation-- but it really reduces the load, as Lionel was saying, on the graphics card.

And then the final step is, you copy the model that's been out pushed to live and open it straight up into 3ds Max Interactive. And then you'll have that same data set that you had in the live editor straight up into Stingray ready for developing your experience. And so you can combine these two workflows, like you saw in the demo with the rail project earlier, to mix your InfraWorks models, your Revit models, and any other sources that you might want to grab an FBX from.

And so we've created a branded VR template that's based on the Max Interactive HTC VIVE template. So when you first load up Max Interactive, you've got a number of templates. Quite a lot of them are gaming-related, so maybe a first-person shooter or something. But there's an HTC VIVE one, and that has all the functionality you need to get straight into VR.

And so we've added some extra features on top of what you get in the vanilla Revit Live experience, the main one being the Mott MacDonald-branded user interface. And we have this, which you might have seen earlier, the meeting room. For this demonstration, we've branded it with Autodesk branding for the occasion, but it would normally be a Mott MacDonald-branded environment.

And that's really nice, because when the user first jumps in, that's the first thing they see. And they're in a familiar surrounding. They're not just jump straight into somewhere like at the top of a skyscraper or something. So you get an impression of the model before you can actually jump into it.

And so you've got a table with an architect-style miniature model there. And we have little map pins like you might see on Google Maps that allow you to jump into the model. So you can have a look around, go, oh, I want to see that bit. I'll jump in there.

And then we've also added information flags, which you can toggle on and off. And you can use these to highlight key parts of your project and draw people's attention to those. And we've also added a markup tool, and this is in early development at the moment. But the idea is that, when we've got collaboration particularly, you can meet with other people, discuss the model, and tag elements that you might want to discuss later.

TOM HUGHES: So this is the combined workflow, but we thought we'd like to show you a live demo within Revit of how easy it is to push model data up to Revit Live. So Toby's just going to start switching over so we can bring Revit up on screen and show you the user interface, and then show you something opening up.

TOBY FOOT: OK. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Isn't it faster to limit how big of a model you can push?

TOM HUGHES: That's a very good question. We're coming to that later, but yeah.

TOBY FOOT: So here's our Revit model. And here's the Go Live button. I shouldn't have just tried to move that. So you can see here, as I said earlier, that the trees aren't very complex at all. They're just two images like this.

So you hit Go Live-- whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not liking this table. And the nice feature is, it tells you here whether your model's ready, so it'll look a number of things. Key things are like, if you've got any section planes-- also section box switched on, or you've got the wrong visual style switched on, things like that-- it'll just give you a nice flag telling you to change those things about your model. It'll also tell you if there's missing textures, things like that.

And then I recommend that you expand Advanced Options and untick this Extend terrain to horizon. So what this will do is it'll take the edge of your terrain here and extend its horizon on out to mountains and stuff. It is quite a nice look for the model, but for what you're going to be doing with it, taking it into 3ds Max Interactive later, it's data you don't need.

So you'd click go, and I won't actually wait. Here's one I made earlier. But you can see it's starting to upload there. Not going to rely on the Wi-Fi here.

And then what you get out of that is this. And you can see, as I said, the detail of the trees there is really improved. And compared to Revit, the graphical fidelity is excellent.

And you can see down in the bottom, there's your VR button. And this is where you can just jump in and have that quick preview. There's lots of nice little features in here, like you can change time of day. It's quite nice.

And it takes in your viewpoints that you would have in Revit, your camera points. And the BIM data's in there as well. Yeah. That's probably enough of that.

TOM HUGHES: Cool.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TOBY FOOT: Yes. Yes. So if you do limit the size of your model, that is what will get processed.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TOBY FOOT: Exactly, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

TOBY FOOT: Yeah, that's a key technique that we used with really large projects to make the performance better.

TOM HUGHES: [INAUDIBLE]

TOBY FOOT: Oh, sorry.

TOM HUGHES: That's OK. Unfortunately, the Alienware laptops, while they're really powerful and have a great graphics card, do not have many USB sockets. So we're having to switch between the mouse and the clicker.

So a question earlier about the size of models. So we were using this on the early days of Expo. And then as we moved into Revit Live, and particularly for the AGM projects, one of the things that we found basically producing models from other people's projects is, we can't always control the models that we get.

As an AEC business like ours, we design some really big things. So stadia, airports, hospitals tend to be fairly big. But these big things have a tendency to cause Revit Live some problems, or at least when we first started.

Actually, we're known by Nicolas Fonta, who's the product manager for Live, because we broke his server by uploading 8 gigabytes of data three times in one day. So that's the fairly intimidating way. So, sorry. Sorry, the camera caught me off-guard there. Where are we?

TOBY FOOT: You're still-- back one.

TOM HUGHES: Back one more. Oh, yeah. Cool, OK. So you've just seen the solution. I'll just go back to the model.

So yeah. Basically, we have one of our projects. We're not going to have time to show you that project as a live demo, but we did a stadium. And that stadium was 8 gigabytes of data that we were trying to get to live.

At that time, we just couldn't get it to work. We broke Nick's server. He didn't get annoyed at us, but was really interested about what we were doing, because he needs to know what kind of models are going in. And we're not the typical architects' models that are the size of a house. We're the size of a stadium, so there we go.

We have got a simple workaround solution, so where we do get users with large models and we need to find a way through that. It's not rocket science. We can either subdivide the model and upload that as two or three pieces to Revit Live, or we can actually go direct into 3ds Max and then into Max Interactive that way.

The drawback, perhaps, of that route is you don't get the processing of Revit Live. So the kind of function Toby talked about in terms of the improvements that Revit Live is doing automatically, you lose out on that a little bit. But really, if you're thinking about dealing with a large stadium, you can maybe think that you bulk upload the big piece, and then think about the experience for a user, and do some small submodels for those parts of the level design.

TOBY FOOT: So we often get IFC files from architects normally. And a problem with IFCs in Revit is they just come through with no materials, just a big gray mass. And this isn't what we want to be presenting to our clients in the Max experience. So--

TOM HUGHES: There they are. How do we solve the IFC problem?

LIONEL GRAF: What we can say is that one of the workaround we can put in place to overcome those kind of challenges is to, first, to bind your IFC link file into your Revit. So the thing is that, Live will not be able to leverage all the information that are contained in the IFC if it's only a link file somewhere. So it's an element that is added to your Revit project. But if you bind this into your Revit project, Live would get access to all the metadata that are contained in the IFC file.

The trickiest thing is the materials. So right now, we don't really have a solution to deal with the materials. Again, if this IFC file is binding to the Revit model, you will have access to the graphic definition or properties of the object. But Live will need to leverage what is in the appearance tab in Revit. Basically, what you will get if you render the Revits using the cloud, for example.

And this is not something that come through with the IFC. So for materials, for the moment, you will need to leverage something like 3ds Max, or 3ds Max Interactive directly to tweak those materials afterwards when you get those data into your VR environment.

TOM HUGHES: So I believe the model that we all live demoing today is one of the models that a large portion of the content in there came to us via IFC. So you get to see how we've worked with IFC, and how we're delivering VR from an IFC base.

TOBY FOOT: Yeah. The concrete is Revit, and then I think everything-- oh, and steelwork. Everything else is IFC.

Right. So a really important factor to consider when you're making a VR experience is locomotion, i.e., how you're going to get around. And also performance. A good locomotion experience is absolutely critical in VR.

And bad locomotion can have really bad side effects, make people nauseous, and put them off VR. And it's something I get a lot when I'm trying to demo VR to people. They'll say, oh, no, I don't want to try it. I had a bad experience before.

So we tried several techniques for locomotion. And one of the main tips we have is-- even though you'll actually see it in games-- it's not a nice experience to have rotation that's not controlled by the headset. If I'm looking over here, you don't want to be able to push a button and then make my view change without me moving my head, because it really disrupts your sense of direction.

So there's a few methods that we recommend for being best practice. Teleportation is the main one. And this is something that's used, again, in a lot of games, where-- you'll see it later-- you push a button on the controller, you'll get an arc coming out of the end of your controller like you're throwing a ball. And where that arc ends is where you'll jump to. It's really intuitive. As soon as someone presses that button, it's pretty obvious what's going to happen.

The next one is what I talked about earlier with the map pins. So points that you want to highlight, points you want to say, this is a good place, this is a nice view, this is where you'll see the part of the model we want you to see. So place those points at nice points of interest around your model.

And then, so you can leverage that two ways. You can either have it so you're jumping around when you're actually in the model, or like I was talking about earlier when the models on the table, use it to jump from the scale-- the way you're looking over the model-- to the human scale when you're inside the model.

And then the last type of locomotion-- which, to be honest, is probably used less-- is using some sort of vehicle. So you might be driving in a car. You might be on a Segway or something. Something that makes the user feel that the locomotion's OK. They're not just being dragged along. There's something to ground their sense of movement.

Things that we really don't recommend is free movement. So like you'd have in a normal first-person shooter, pushing a direction to move without actually the player moving. And flying. So taking off, flying out around the model in first person can be a really nauseating experience.

And of course, actually, I forgot to do one form of locomotion that's probably the most obvious. Walking around is the absolute best way to move around in your model. You're obviously limited. Here, we've only got a 2-by-2 meter space for the room scale. What's that, about 6 feet or something.

But it can go up to 5-by-5 meters, and that's actually a pretty decent space. And you can really play with that a lot. We made that Mott MacDonald-branded room the same size, 5 by 5 meters. So when you've got that maximum play space, you never need to teleport. You can just walk around absolutely freely. OK.

TOM HUGHES: And we're doing a really quick demo, aren't we, on some of the locomotion just so you can see. It's often hard to conceptualize some of those things just looking at a screen, talking about them. It's easy to start to see--

TOBY FOOT: So you're going to narrate with me.

TOM HUGHES: Yeah. We good to go?

TOBY FOOT: Should be. Can you hold the mic?

TOM HUGHES: Yeah, of course. It's the bit you've all been waiting for, the live demo.

TOBY FOOT: Well, I hope I've set the boundaries up right. Otherwise, I'm going to be walking into stuff.

TOM HUGHES: Cool.

TOBY FOOT: The other one way around. OK. So here, you can see the branded room, as we talked about, and the model that's on the table. So I can show you a bit about our UI here.

TOM HUGHES: Actually, I think we cover that later.

TOBY FOOT: We do. But I need to use it to access the viewpoints. So this is the POI, the Point of Interest viewpoints I was talking about. So you have a laser on your controller. You select the one you want to go to. There we go. And yeah, you'll jump in.

And so the next point of locomotion emotional you is that teleportation. So here you go. Can you see the arc? And you might be able to see the white square as well.

And if I walk around, you'll see that I'm walking around in that square. So that shows you your actual room that you're standing in. So if I stick that there, I'll be walking out over the edge. So there we go.

And you've also got the map pins like you did in the table scale to jump around. And now I'm outside. OK.

TOM HUGHES: Really cool. Yeah, thanks. We'll come back to the model in a little bit later. We'll show you all the functions that we've been building with Lionel once we've gone through some of the challenges that we faced early on with our approach.

TOBY FOOT: OK. So as I mentioned earlier, another factor that's really important to get experience is performance. It can really affect users in the same way that bad locomotion can. Make you nauseous, make for a bad impression.

So the recommended minimum frame rate that we want to hit is 90 frames per second. And that's the refresh rate of the VIVE, so matching that will give you a nice, smooth experience. It was like Lionel talked about earlier, there's a number of ways that you can get a good frame rate.

And 3ds Max Interactive has a lot of these functions built in. One would be baking lights. And if you don't know about game development, basically, baking lights is-- you'll see here where the lights shine on the wall.

If that was a real-time light, then you'd get shadows and it'll be actually calculating the photons in real time. But if we're not going to actually be able to cast a shadow there, we can just create that texture with the lights already shown on the texture. And that's what baking the lights is.

And that really reduces the performance hit. Especially in a large model like that stadium model, we had thousands and thousands of lights in that model. And there was just absolutely no way even out of VR that you could get the kind of performance you need.

And like we talked about earlier, geometry is also a big factor. So like Lionel said, in that stadium model, we had thousands and thousands of seats. And if that's a high-polygon model, you're just creating massive amounts of complexity.

And often, there's no real need. You can get away with something much less. And things that are hidden, like ductwork, it's easy just to switch those off. OK.

TOM HUGHES: Cool. So one of the things we wanted to talk about was brand identity. Clearly, when we looked at the user interface of our first Stingray project, we'd got a fixed UI, so that Mott MacDonald brand was evident all over the place.

I suppose you have to go back and ask why brand identity is important. And for me, it's how your customer knows-- or your customer, and also your customer's customer knows who you are. There's a few ways to think about brand identity within VR.

But we trialed some early approaches with perhaps a floating UI where we've got Mott MacDonald visible within the model, or putting Mott MacDonald-branded assets within the client's model space. We felt it was a little bit of an intrusion into the client's experience.

So we worked with Mott to come up with some concepts of how we could do this differently. And you can see the Mott MacDonald space there, and like Toby said today, for today's UI, we've branded that with Autodesk space. Clearly, when we're working in joint venture, or we're working for a client specifically, because this is just a VR space, we can just change out the identity within this model of a concept of a room-scale model with a table on top.