Redesign of Design: Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Empathy

JONATHAN BARTLING: All right, good morning everybody. Does that sound good? All right. Thank you all for being here. Hopefully this early into the trip there aren't too many regrets or hangovers or anything like that. But you have the rest of the week. So my name's Jonathan Bartling. I am an architect. I work at a company called HGA-- Hammel, Green, and Abrahamson. We were founded in 1953. We have 11 offices and counting, kind of span coast to coast.

These three gentlemen founded the company, and we've always been kind of predicated on this interdisciplinary approach to architecture, engineering, and construction. Just real quick, some project portfolio pieces, we do kind of everything from large commercial projects, office campuses, hospitals, universities, arts, education, museums, kind of all project types from large scale to small scale are spanned across our portfolio.

But today I'm here representing our digital practice group. And our digital practice group is really a group of subject matter experts predicated on kind of that interdisciplinary approach to architecture and engineering. So we have architects, engineers, graphic designers, computer programmers within our studio. And we're really kind of organized around this holistic approach to architecture, engineering, and thinking about innovation, research, development of our profession.

And what I'm going to be talking about today is really kind of that pursuit. And I'm going to be doing some pivots between an industry perspective, some of the work that we're doing, some of the work that we're following that others are doing, and really kind of study this trend of integration and these steeper integration cycles. So if you look at this chart here, this is when certain technology became available. So you could buy a computer in the mid-1960s. But at HGA, we didn't get a computer in our office until 1983. And there wasn't a computer on every desk until 1997.

So there is a pretty long integration cycle there. And then you see kind of moving more towards current day and all of these things that become available and how they're integrated into practice much quicker. These are things that probably everybody in this room is dealing with and it's probably why you're here at Autodesk University, to figure out how we kind of approach this rapid iteration of new advancements. And that's really what this talk today is going to be focused around.

And again, this is the work of a collective body. I'm just here to represent that. But without all of these incredible people that I get to work with every day, we would not be able to do this. And again, we have engineers, architects, computer programmers. And we kind of approach our problem solving methodology through these different lenses, which I think results in some of the things that is going to be showcased today.

So I think the first thing we need to do is kind of look at our industry and recognize that we're incredibly inefficient. But we don't have to be. And if you look at this trend line here from the McKinsey report, this is architecture, engineering, and construction productivity increases since 1995. And if you compare that to manufacturing and other industries, you see that there's a huge spread between our productivity increases and others outside the industry of architecture, engineering, and construction.

So something manufacturing has figured out is something that we should be thinking about and studying. And if you kind of deconstruct why we are having problems with productivity gains, a lot of it has to do with external forces that are kind of out of our control, things like plan reviews and the increasing complexity and kind of the dynamic nature in which we deliver our services. But if you look at things that we can control, it's kind of these things related to fragmented and opaque kind of discrepancies in the way we deliver services, misaligned contracts.

And then there's kind of inefficient processes and poor project management that all kind of results in this poor inefficiency game. And so really, we need to think about kind of a health check. And I think that this week while you're all here there's a lot of opportunity to think about how you can employ various tactics that you're going to learn to your own work to kind of increase your productivity, and ultimately redefine the way we approach design.

But before we go there, I think it's also really interesting to kind of understand the time and space that we're in. So the Industrial Revolution, we saw huge kind of gains in the way people delivered goods and services. And then you look at the technological revolution. This was the birth of the assembly line, and again, kind of this mass production of goods and services became prevalent in the way we approach industry.

And then this is really kind of the space where we saw kind of great advancement in our own industry in the mid-70s when you had kind of the informational revolution and more access to computing power. And then you kind of look at where we're at today with this internet and all of the applications and all of these products and industries that you can procure services with an internet connection. And it's really kind of democratized the way that we operate.

And then when you think about our industry, we went from kind of the master builder, where the architect was on site and they did drawings and they did paintings and they did sculpture and they did all kinds of direction to kind of everybody that was holistically available on site, and then we got into this kind of specialization, where we were just kind of producing drawings. And that has been kind of the similar, consistent way we've approached architecture for many, many years.

And my perspective is that as we get closer to current day, there's a lot more that we can do. And we now have the opportunity to deliver a lot more than just paper drawings. And that's really what we're going to be kind of talking about today. And we're going to be thinking about how can some of these new technologies allow us to kind of redefine architecture?

And then one more, kind of just setting the table slide, so we have all of these different companies that are completely decimating the industries that they're part of. So you think about what Uber has done to the taxicab business. You think about what Amazon has done to the big box retail stores. You think about what Airbnb has done to the hotel industry. We might have that opportunity. And so if you look at that, a lot of these-- and obviously, this is not a holistic accounting for all of these different companies. But some of them provide services. Others provide products. And some have become kind of a hybrid of both.

And you can then look at what's happening down here. And you really think that the smartphone really allowed and empowered a lot of this to become accessible. With a phone you can do a lot of things that you were not able to do before. And if you kind of look at the different industries-- so you've got some of these are social platforms, others are kind of transportation platforms, travel platforms. But the really scary thing, and kind of the call to action, needs to be what's happening up here.

So you've got all of these different kind of technology companies that are now coming into our space. So WeWork, I think most people in the room are probably familiar with them. They started as a company in 2008 that was providing office space. And now they've scaled to 200 locations, 175,000 users, and 600 design staff. That's staggering in a 10 year period.

Art Bazaar is a platform that you can go on if you want to get design service. And it's a competition platform that people can go and submit designs. And then you can select the one you want to go with and pay for design services. Blokable is a company that Google has recently purchased. And they're looking at modular buildings. Katara, I think a lot of people are familiar with this.

So there's these kind of emerging companies that are going to disrupt our industry if we don't think about how we're going to do it ourselves. And this is only going to continue to increase. So I think that if we all kind of partner with technology and we kind of organize around lessons learned from these companies, we have the opportunity to really kind of change the landscape of our profession and make sure that others don't come in and do that.

And so one of the things that we've been looking at is, what do the companies like Uber and Facebook and Amazon have? And what are they kind of accessing that allows them to be so successful? And so at the fundamental thing, it's this kind of underutilized asset. So you think about Airbnb, they're using vacation homes that people aren't spending time in to allow them to generate income while there are opportunities for people taking vacations to stay in a nicer place.

Timing and kind of the generations have a lot to do with it. This idea of convenience-- I can call an Uber to pick me up in a specific location and I can kind of track their progress on the way to get me. A community-- so you need drivers and you need people that are using the service. And then a lot of these companies are predicated on metrics. So how do they kind of organize around the data that they're getting?

Think about Amazon. When you go on to Amazon to buy something, you can look at reviews. So there's these reviews that give you kind of information on if the product or service that you're buying is good. Technological platforms are kind of the underpinning all of this. And then there's something to be said about kind of the culture and the brand of all of these businesses. We saw kind of what has happened at Uber with the transition and the leadership and why that needed to happen.

And then cost. You know, a lot of these things you can get in a more convenient way for cheaper. So these are all things that I think we can apply to our practice. And you think about this, we have clients and owners kind of squeezing our fee. And they're asking us to really kind of do some self thinking about what does this actually mean for us? And what is our value proposition?

And if this thing looks like Pac-Man, I suggest that we organize around all of these variables or elements that have been successful for other people so that we can truly enhance our value proposition. And if we think about the why we are doing these things, and we kind of organize around the why and we partner with technology, I think that gives us a lot of opportunity to really make a difference. So now we're going to look at practice and what some people out there are doing.

And I would highly recommend this book for anybody in this room. This was, I think, 2001, 2011, somewhere-- one of those two. But Kieran Timberlake published this. And they kind of looked at why architecture, engineering and construction is not moving as quickly as the airline manufacturers, shipbuilders, and the auto industry. And what they found out was that all of these industries have organized around modules.

So traditionally, airplanes, ships cars were all constructed in the same way, kind of from the ground up. Gravity was a big control. What they found out, though, was now all these kind of-- these three vehicles are all being organized around modules. So the entire dashboard of a car is produced somewhere else and then plugged in on the assembly line. The entire fuselage of an airplane is built in one location and then brought to the assembly line. And now the assembly line just becomes kind of the way to piece these things together.

And what they found was that by doing this they could greatly increase efficiency, but they could also increase safety and the way products were delivered. So in traditional ways ships would be built, the hull would be built and then people would have to kind of climb down through the hulls to do all the wiring and it was incredibly time consuming and they had to bring all their tools and stuff with them. But now the modular approach kind of allows them to do that in parallel to everything, which results in efficiency productivity gains.

So you look at kind of what Kieran Timberlake is doing, and they're organizing around some of these principles that companies like Uber and Facebook have figured out. But what they're doing is they're understanding that there are multiple stakeholders involved in our projects. We've got the architects and the consultants, the contractors, projects, engineers, and material scientists. And if we have this platform that enables all of us to kind of work in an ecosystem to provide the building, bring the vision and economy to scale, while exploring new materials and products, we can deliver buildings like this.

This is the [INAUDIBLE] house. They modularized it and then delivered it. Did the same thing with the cellophane house in New York. But again, it's kind of operationalizing some of these variables that we're seeing other companies having success with to deliver product.

Shop Architects in New York is doing something very similar. Their whole kind of model is organized around this documentation to fabrication, and just kind of direct to fabricate. And they're finding that that is increasing their bottom line. It's making things more efficient. And it's ultimately reducing a lot of the collaboration errors that happen in the field.

And then if you look at The Living, which is an Autodesk company, they've been doing kind of similar things with their research. And all of these are kind of creating these ecosystems that organize around a technological platform. But it allows the user to understand the data in kind of the community that they're operating in to advance what they're doing.

So HGA, we're doing kind of similar things. And in our virtual reality and augmented reality space, we're really focusing on how these hardware platforms can enable us to disrupt architecture in a similar way that some of these other disrupters in industry have done. And so we're doing very similar things. We're organizing around underutilized resources. We're thinking about the time and space that we occupy. We're thinking about how we can be informed by the data and how we can do things more collaboratively and more cost effectively.

I think most people in this room probably know the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality. Virtual reality, fully immersive experience where you put a headset on and you're kind of removed from your surrounding and it's all kind of digital landscape. Augmented reality is you're layering kind of the virtual landscape over the actual.

So I think that this is really interesting. Most people here probably understand the Intel computing power and Moore's law. And since 1965 to current day, computing power has doubled every two years while getting cheaper. And that's kind of what this timeline is showing. And I just used apples to kind of compare apples to apples.

But virtual reality, while it existed for decades, it hasn't-- it was very cost prohibitive to enter into the space. And it wasn't until 2015 that HTC had developed their consumer grade kit that was just the developer kit. And it wasn't until 2016 that that actually came out as a product, same year that the Oculus Rift came out. And then the VIVE Pro just came out in 2018.

So the stuff that we're talking about today that our group has been exploring has been stuff that we've just been looking at for three years, really. And we've come a long way in those three years. And I think that if you look at the workflow that we've organized around, our designers work in a lot of different platforms. Revit, SketchUp, Rhino are kind of the three base modeling programs that people use. We for quite some time have been using Unity as our rendering engine. So we model in one of these programs, port it over to Unity, and then bring it into the VR AR environment.

With Forge, we've now been using Forge as kind of the bridge to get us from the modeling environment into the virtual or augmented reality environment. We're still using Unity as our render engine. Some people are using Enscape. There's a lot of-- some people are using Unreal. There's a lot of different kind of products out there. But this is the one that we've kind of been using as the base.

But what we're finding with Forge is that we have this better kind of connection between the model software and the end user experience. So the first project I'm going to talk about is called the Empathy Effect. And this is a project that we had a principal, Alana Carter, from our health group come to us and say, you know, we design a lot of facilities for the aging population and we're really interested in understanding how people with aging eye conditions are experiencing the space that we designed for them.

So we kind of started thinking about, what does empathy really mean? What is the kind of scientific underpinning for the various ailments that one may suffer from as they grow older? And what does that look like in terms of demographics? And what we found were 75% of people 65 and over have some sort of eye condition.

And so this was a really-- it's tragic that people suffer from that. But it was a really important thing for us to organize around, because we understand that the three kind of major eye conditions that people in this demographic suffer from are cataracts, which is a blurring of what you see, glaucoma, which puts kind of a black field of view around your periphery, and then macular degeneration, which kind of blurs out the center field of view and then allows you to kind of see things on the periphery.

And so what we started thinking about-- and a lot of times I talked about the why. The why it's so important to our work. We like to ask and challenge ourselves, why are we doing this? And so when we think about that continuum of how we pursue design, back in the earlier days, it was all about exploration through drawing. And then it became about exploration through kind of perspectival views. And then virtual reality kind of allows us to have this understanding and comprehension of space, through wherever we look.

But this project, we are really interested in how can we perceive other people's perspectives? And so you think about, as you move forward, it's really easy to remember what it was like to be younger than you were. So when I tell my son, you know, I know what he's going through because I've been there, I can empathize with him. But it's much harder for him to think the other way-- what am I experiencing?-- because he has no clue what it's like to be in my shoes.

So this was kind of the challenge that we wanted to organize around. How do we empathize with somebody that has a different condition that we may not? So we started with kind of the visual effects, because that seemed to be the easiest. And one of the things our studio really organizes around is this idea of minimum viable product. So we started with just kind of Google Cardboard, Photoshop filters, and a phone, and kind of tested what that looked like. And then we kind of moved to a prototype, where we were actually hard coding these filters in the HTC VIVE. And then we started testing it.

And so this is not a great representation of what you experience. It's so much more emotionally impactful when you put this on. But what you see in the upper left is a view of a corridor in a senior living facility with no filter. And then on the top right, you see with the glaucoma filter-- sorry, the cataracts filter-- bottom left is the glaucoma filter and then bottom right is the macular degeneration filter.

But what we were doing is we were using and layering these filters onto the experience to kind of test space for lighting, signage, way finding, what you could see from different points in the corridor. And then we found this suit that is supposed to replicate things like arthritis and loss of mobility. And we paired this suit with the experience. And then we started measuring how people were navigating the space. And we were looking at it from kind of an analytics perspective.

And pairing the two together, we could then start measuring the different experiences. And so our process was very scientific. We started with a pre-survey that kind of tested people's aptitude towards empathy. There were a bunch of questions that kind of elicited a baseline. And then we actually put them through the experience with no filters on, and kind of had them get comfortable with navigating the space. And then we added the body suit with the various filters. And we kind of measured their responses.

And what we were finding was that people were very interested in what was important to them when they had the filters on and the difference between what was not important to them when they did. And when we looked at this matched pairs t-test, we found that this did actually facilitate a more empathetic understanding of the people that they were designing space for. This was recognized by Architect Magazine for an R&D award. And I'm going to just play this quick video here.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- One thing that I actually thought was interesting was--

JONATHAN BARTLING: Sorry. Hold on.

- I felt like I was actually more aware of the surroundings with the impairments.

- Just the way that you see things as the model got darker, it became so much more difficult to even enjoy it, but to move around.

- It basically showed me that things that I might think are important might not be important for people. I can't even acknowledge that they're there. I probably see myself as a pretty understanding person, but I'm definitely going to have to think a little bit more about how other people perceive space. I think mostly what I felt was unbalanced.

- Like I might fall over at any time.

- Whether it be today or in the future, any good design is in response to the needs of the people that it's serving. If it's something that's more feeling or experientially based and it's using that as the primary way of evaluating what's a good design, I think that's where architecture should be heading in general.

[END PLAYBACK]

JONATHAN BARTLING: So in the spirit of that, we've kind of continued pursuing our research with VR. And again, that kind of last quote about using virtual reality and some of these tools to understand the people that we're designing for rather than the actual buildings is really important to us. And we think that's where the future of design is going. I think that most people in this room know how to use the various tool sets to convey design intent, to look at simulations and understanding building performance. But if we can take it the next step to really understand the people that we're designing for, that's going to give us a very impactful deliverable to the work force.

So one of the things that we've been looking at is kind of this emerging Gen Z population. And we know that there are people that were born from '96 to 2010 that are going to be entering into our workforce soon. And we wanted to kind of do something different with virtual reality and kind of push the boundaries and look at things that haven't been done before.

So we solicited a group of Gen Zers and we asked them a bunch of stuff about design elements related to the office and what it should look like. And they drew pictures. And this is something that somebody drew where they put wheels on everything and mobility and kind of customizing the workspace was really important for them. And then we developed these ideas about how people collaborate with each other, how they feel security and space, how they learn, how they kind of find their way through space with way finding mechanisms, how they have access to light and nature.

And then what we did was we paired that with a survey. But we wanted the survey to be something that they could use in the virtual reality environment. And so we took those kind of ideas that you saw on the infographics and we built this container file that had different interventions across this model. And then we paired it with the iPad. So as the person went into VR, they had a very curated experience, and they were taken to these 12 different destinations. And they had the iPad-- not physically, but virtually, in the VR space-- and the iPad asked them a number of questions as they went through the spaces. And so you're going to see these nine different spaces that we were exploring. And at each space, the iPad asked them a different question.

And then we were able to measure their results. So do you prefer a virtual receptionist? That was kind of the first question they got at the front door. They could make their selection and then they went on. And so they kind of continued through the different environments. And at each one, they were asked questions. And then the questions allowed them to have their results populated for the designers. And then the designers could use that to kind of measure what was important to these individuals.

And we had about 350 participants go through this. And they were able to kind of consume the model in a way that allowed us to generate enough metrics that we could kind of indicate what was important to this sample size. And then the last project I'm going to talk about today is the Reconnect Rondo project. So this is kind of our first venture into augmented reality. And this is a project in the Twin Cities, in St. Paul, one of the Twin Cities, so it's Minneapolis and St. Paul.

St. Paul had this freeway, 94, come in. And when they put this in, 600 homes and 300 businesses were displaced. And this is the Rondo community right here. And what happened was that ended up getting severed. And so this was kind of a very strong, vibrant community. And when 94 came through, it really became disconnected. And there's a couple pedestrian bridge and a vehicular bridge, but otherwise there's really no connection to these two points.

And so what the community is looking at is putting a land bridge on top to kind of reconnect the north half from the south half. And when we think about the way we connect-- and again, you kind of look at the timeline of connectivity-- we used to exchange information via mail. And then the phone came along and we were able to connect via landline. And then the computer came along and we were able to connect via the wireless communications.

And what we're really looking at here, in this particular project, is how do we, again, connect through experience, and how do we layer these experiences at different scales? So the first thing that we're doing is just kind of understanding the site and what this landbridge would truly look like and what are the uses on the north and south sides. And if we populated that land bridge, what might it be? And what might that kind of feel like?

But we wanted to ask ourselves, because 900 plus people were displaced from this community, how do we empower them to really give us the information we need to move this project forward? So we came up with this idea that we could create a number of different kind of program types, whether it's parks or markets or municipal buildings or single family, multifamily residences. And so we built this physical model with all of these different kind of program blocks to allow people to interface with that and program the landbridge based on what they thought was appropriate.

But we said, you know, this is inaccessible. You have to have the physical model somewhere and you have to have somebody there that is kind of documenting what plates they put in the different program elements. So we thought, what if we built an app? And what if that app was something that could allow them to see their ideas in augmented reality? And so what ended up happening was we took all of those models that we had 3D printed and we made them as individual blocks within the app.

And then you see that land bridge there. And they can actually determine what program piece they want to put where. And then they can look at it both on the map here-- so you see this individual has the iPad. And when they scan one of these QR codes, it allows them to see their idea overlaid on the physical map. And the next place we're taking this is there is kind of a community park right here. And we're going to point a QR code that will allow the individual to scan their phone or their iPad, and then they can see their idea in the physical space.

And then the other idea is that there's a hosting site. So when you're done with this, there's a little button up here you push, and that will publish your design idea. And then the people that are working on the project can go and overlay kind of all the data and analytics to understand what the community wants, and then it will also allow the community to explore ideas that their neighbors might have. And they can go and look at this site, what that would mean for the future of this neighborhood.

And the reason augmented reality was so important for us in this was because we didn't want to accidentally not model somebody's house or have some inaccuracies in the 3D existing conditions because there is so much sensitivity around what happened in this site. So what we wanted to do is all the existing conditions would be handled in physical space and all the proposed interventions would be dealt with in augmented reality.

So this is the park right here. This is existing. The rest of this is all kind of just a vision. And so there's going to be a little station point here that will allow you to look north to this area, which is right now just a highway. But this is kind of showing that vision of what it could be. So just a couple more slides, and then I'll open it up for questions.

So this whole idea that we started with about these long integration cycles of something becoming a consumer product and then being integrated into the workflow and then kind of becoming standard practice is something that we believe has resulted in different ways of understanding your design or your proposal. So we understood by drawing and then drafting and then modeling and now inhabiting with the virtual reality and the augmented reality, but the real power, we think, is from understanding these different perspectives.

And if you think about that in terms of what we talked about in the beginning of the presentation where there's kind of all this disruption happening across all industries, if we can really kind of organize around these principles and understand things in a different way and kind of apply new approaches, we can really kind of define how we're going to move this space forward. And a lot of it is about this idea about organizing around data and information, much like Uber and Amazon have.

Others are about organizing around experience. And a lot of these companies are kind of curating very specific intentional experiences for their users. We can do the same thing. We can build these applications that allow us to experience platforms and user interfaces and such in a different way. And ultimately, we really think that this is going to allow us to see a number of different perspectives. And where we're really going is thinking about how we can design in real time.

And we have the tools to do that. We have the technology. Most people in this room probably have the understanding or access to understanding that allow us to approach these things in that way. And now I'm going to play one more video. My videos have not been playing in presentation mode, which is why I'm doing this. So this is one other thing that we're exploring related to this idea of the real-time design.

And so in this video you're going to see, as I said earlier, we do a lot of medical work. And this is Ryan Spearing, one of the members of our team. And what he's doing is kind of laying out an OR suite. So he's got a palette of typical equipment that would be in the OR. And he's able to kind of move it around, manipulate it in real time. And again, this allows us to create a collaborative environment where people that are working on the project can see what's happening. And we can explore a lot of different interventions all at once.

And if we're meeting with the client and they say, you know, this wouldn't be here, I'd rather have it here, we can move that in real time, which goes back to that last series of slides. So with about 15 minutes left, there's time for questions.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: How did we do-- so, OK. I don't-- this is being recorded, so I'll just repeat the question. So the question is, how do we do that with green screen? So what we did was we hooked a camera up to one of the VIVE controllers, so that the VIVE controller knew where it was. And it was a whole play on first person versus third person. So first person perspective is obviously how the immersed user experiences VR. But when you just watch somebody walking around without that overlay of them in space, it doesn't really do a lot for you. So we wanted to understand how could we see that person operating in space?

So you need the green screen. So we hooked up the camera to the VIVE controller. We wrote some custom code that allowed us to, with that controller, track the person in space. And then because we have the green screen, we were able to overlay that in a model environment and see the two in one.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: Yep. Yeah. So I think, you know, that may not have been clear in the presentation, that a lot of the stuff we're doing is custom, and it's custom code built on top of existing platforms. But it's-- we've come so far in the baseline platforms that building that custom code on top of them is-- I don't want to say-- it's difficult, but it's not something that is inaccessible for anybody in this space to do. You know, if you understand the fundamentals of how these softwares work, you can often kind of hack this stuff together.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: So we are lucky enough to have a couple of programmers on our team. And so they actually built it in-house. And that kind of goes back to this premise that our group is really predicated on this interdisciplinary approach. So we start by organizing around passion and really good questions. And then we have this diverse skill set that can operationalize it and bring it to fruition. And I think that one of the things that is really important to this kind of changing landscape and our profession is understanding what a staff should look like.

And we would absolutely say there should be a competency in computer programming on any staff of any size. I mean, our team is about 14 and we have two programmers on the team.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: We're trying to figure that out right now. We're looking at three different options. Option one is to sell it. Option two is just to upload it somewhere for free and allow people to start building on top of it. And then the third option is to license it to somebody to kind of take it over and move it forward. Because again, we're an architecture and engineering company. We're not a software company. But that doesn't mean that we might not put this out there like some other architecture companies, Kieren Timberlake a great one, where they put Tally out there as a program that they sell.

So we're kind of exploring it right now, what we're going to do, and we hope to kind of make that decision in Q1 of 2019. OK.

AUDIENCE: What were some of the tangible design decisions that sprung out of [INAUDIBLE]?

JONATHAN BARTLING: Great. Great question. So again, I'm just repeating this for the recording. So the question was, what were some of the results of the empathy effect, tangible results? So the first one, and I think the most important thing with virtual reality, is we work with really smart clients. But our smart clients-- and when I say we, I mean the collective we in this room. You may not always think that. But generally speaking, they are.

But they're not trained in our kind of landscape of understanding how to kind of interpret drawings and various other things. So I think that the fundamental thing with virtual reality is they get it. Like, you put them in-- you'll show them photorealistic renderings and they nod and stuff. And you put them in the space, and they're like, oh, my gosh, this is-- yeah. This is exactly what I was thinking. Or immediately, that is in the absolute wrong spot, even though they were just looking at it in a picture.

So the kind of one-for-one understanding is the most valuable application of virtual reality. But in terms of tangible design outcomes of that, one of the big things we were looking at was glazing and how much. And one of the things we were exploring was full curtain wall, 50% curtain wall, punched openings. And that was something that was really going to be VEed out of the project. And what we were doing was testing what happened when we backed off from a full glass to partial to minimal.

And what we found was on that corridor, which is a long corridor, and way finding is so critical in these facilities, when we started reducing the glass, there was a lot of impact on the people with the eye deficiencies with seeing the signs and the way finding, as well as the transitional parts of the building. So the most critical outcome was they didn't VE that glass. They looked for other things.

And you heard one of the designers, Lena, talking about the things that she thought were important from a design perspective were completely transformed once she occupied that environment and was able to kind of understand what some of the other implications had and how much more impactful they were. So the glass was a huge one.

Another big one was how far things were located from each other. So we could understand-- I can see very clearly from this point to the exit over there. But if I layer some of those filters on, that might not be the case. So strategically placing elements within that building were another kind of critical outcome. And I would say that we-- this is-- we've only-- you know, we're talking about three years of kind of testing and development. So this hasn't been applied in a prolific way to all of our projects. But we're using it on a lot of projects.

And what we've found is you can tell somebody-- you know, this is-- like, I'm a trained professional and this is the outcome. But if you show them and they kind of experience it in a one for one way, it's much easier to help them understand how to spend their resources appropriately.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: Sorry, I'm having a hard time hearing. OK. So, so--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: Right. So the question was why aren't we going to a wider connected experience with more people in the same environment? And why aren't we using Powell lens or something that allow kind of the more interactivity?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: OK. So the first part, when we started this research, we didn't have the ability to-- the reason we started in virtual reality was because we thought that if we explore the different filters, that's kind of a one-for-one thing. Like, it's something that is tangible and allows us to kind of organize around this minimum viable product deliverable.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: What's that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: Yeah, no, it's fine. So what I'm going to just-- I'm going to kind of give you the evolution of this. So we started this project 2 and 1/2 years ago. And we did do it with just kind of one person going through the experience at a time. We now have built something we call multiplayer. We can have up to 10 people in the same environment at the same time. We've been using it for one of our designs where the main lead designer's in DC and we've got the design team actually in our DC office. And so they explore the design and CAD models in this multiplayer.

The reason, though, that we wanted to have one person for the empathy effect in the project at a time is because we were doing a scientific study. And you have to have control variables. And we have researchers on staff and they explained to us that we needed-- we could not have more than one person in an environment at a time, because that would impact the control. So that's why we did one person at a time for the empathy effect.

It was a very curated scientific experiment. We can put up to 10 people in an environment at the same time. They're disconnected, but we've got emojis where they see each other's headset. One of the slides showed kind of multiple people in there. Yes, it's disconnected. But the virtual reality kind of environment was where we started exploring. The 3D goggles where you're connected to people, I think, is absolutely the future. And that's why we're starting to explore the space in augmented reality.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JONATHAN BARTLING: Great. Thank you. Other questions? Yes.

AUDIENCE: So you mentioned that the architectural field has low productivity. But I was wondering, how do you balance streamlining the design and hyperefficient processes versus going the extra mile to understand the specifics [INAUDIBLE].

JONATHAN BARTLING: Right. It's a great question, and I don't have a good answer. We're exploring it. We're trying to figure it out. I think that creative enterprise is one that we will iterate and iterate and iterate in the kind of continuum of time we have. And so that's a really hard question to answer. I think we're searching for the answer. We're trying to figure out how we can balance-- better balance-- the overall pursuit. And if you talk to the individuals from the living, they talk about BIM being kind of one of the first kind of transformational platforms that have really augmented our industry in hundreds of years, because CAD was basically a computer representation of the drawing board. And so it wasn't really that much of a shift, where BIM, you know, now you're integrating modeling and information and collaboration in one platform.