Create, Enhance and Present: Practical VR/AR Presentations, Solved

IAN HALL: Hello and welcome to our session on Creating, Enhancing, and Presenting Business-Ready VR and AR. I'm Ian Hall, Chief Product Officer at Yulio technologies. Over the next 30 minutes, I'm going to show you how Yulio has cleared the hurdles to making VR/AR an everyday tool for architecture and design. So with that, let's dive in.

So Yulio has been providing business-centric VR solutions for over half a decade. In addition to early adoption in architecture and design, Yulio is the premier provider of VR rendering and presentation technology to the contract furniture industry. And this includes leading companies like Steelcase and HermanMiller. The one thing these customers really have in common is they need to sell a vision of spaces or products that have not yet been built. So from the client's perspective, we like to think of this as the "I'm just not seeing it" problem.

Now, as design professionals, a lot of you can probably picture exactly what it feels like to stand in a space or hold a product based on nothing more than a set of blueprints. But that's really not the case for the average person. VR really bridges this gap. A lot of you have already tried VR. And many of you will have that breakthrough moment where a VR has taken your client from I don't get it to I see it. I understand what you're telling me

But despite those successes, most of you probably aren't using VR every day. And that's because it's time consuming. It's time consuming to create stereoscopic equirectangular renders, to enhance them with navigation, to get them on to headsets, to get the headsets on the clients. There's some friction there. And it's tough to justify the effort except maybe on special occasions. This is where Yulio comes in. We have cleared the barriers to adoption by tackling three key areas-- creating, enhancing, and presenting.

So let's get started with the first big barrier-- creating VR content. Now, of course, it's been possible to create VR content from Revit for years. But up until now, the workflow has been clunky, to be kind. You needed a third-party renderer to create the VR-compatible scenes. You then needed to publish to some sort of VR engine. Then you usually had to do some sort of enhancement for viability. And then you had to package it up for presentation.

It's a lot of steps. And, while it works, it's time consuming. And it tends to require a degree of expertise. Now, in order to get to that strong ROI that we're all aiming for from VR, we need to start by making the creation step a lot simpler. So to do this, we've brought our Yulio cloud-based rendering technology to Revit. So this advancement makes it possible to publish directly from Revit to client-ready VR in a single operation.

So let's have a look and see how that works. My colleague, Dana, has joined us. And she is going to be demonstrating that workflow. So, as you can see, Dana has loaded up a Revit project. Now, it's nothing fancy. It's just a few thousand square feet, basic environmental interior lights, and some simple materials. To turn this into a compelling VR experience, she only needs to do a few things though.

So first, she needs at least a single 3D view. So you can see here that she's got about a dozen or a half dozen different cameras set up. Now, a side note on that, as designers, you always want to maintain control of your narrative. But the last thing you want is your client wandering off into a closet or banging into a wall in virtual reality. So with Yulio, this is really easy to accomplish. You just position the cameras to tell your story. And we'll take care of the rest as we're going to see in a few moments.

Now the second thing you want to consider is a floor plan because the floor plan provides that big-picture view. Now, Yulio doesn't require floor plans. But if you have one, Yulio will automatically turn it into a really powerful navigation tool, which, again, we're going to see shortly. And you can pick from any floor plans that you've created. And they will be visually representative of whatever you've defined inside of Revit.

Now technically, that's it. We're ready to go. We can hit the big, red button. And we can turn this into a VR experience. But wait-- as Steve Jobs would famously say-- there's actually one more thing I'd like to walk through here before we move on. Yulio has just introduced a fully automated Revit to AR publishing feature. So let's have a quick look at that on the authoring side before we move on.

Now, all you need to do to turn any Revit item into an AR object is to tag it. And, as you can see, it's very simple. You add a tag. You give it a name. And you save. That tells the platform that you want that object to be treated as AR when it gets converted into a VR project. That's it, very simple. We're going to look at the results of that a little bit later.

For now, it's time to fire up Yulio. So our next step is we fire up the Yulio plugin. So a couple of things to take note of here. First of all, it's a very simple interface. There's only a handful of settings. The idea behind this was to make it as simple as possible so that anyone can use it.

Now, you have a couple of different options for output. One is the VR project obviously. The other is you can create traditional 4 by 3 photo renderings. And these are handy to create if you're generating PDFs or presentations together with your VRs. For now, we're just going to stick with VR. Next you pick your enhancements. You can see we've got three options here. You can enable the navigation. And these are the point-to-point navigation hotspots between the cameras.

And next is the augmented reality. So we saw earlier that we have enabled AR. So all we have to do here is check off that we want those objects to appear in our project. And the last is we're going to go and find all the floorplans you've added. You get to pick the one they want and include it the project. And that's it we're pretty well ready to go. You tap Create and the Yulio platform will take it from there.

So with that, let's talk about the next steps. So the process to turn your Revit project into a VR can take anywhere from a couple of minutes up to tens of minutes. And that really just depends on the complexity of the project and the number of scenes and objects you place in there. But you don't have to wait around. As soon as the process is completed, you're going to automatically receive an email that looks something like this. And it contains a live link directly to your client-ready project. So let's have a look at what that looks like.

So here we have the output from what we just generated inside of Revit. Now, a couple of things that we want to note. First is you've got a high-quality, ray-traced rendering that takes full advantage of Revit's native physically-based lighting and materials. The second thing is you can see that the cameras have been translated into navigational hotspots automatically for me. I didn't have to do anything. And I can use these to navigate through the project. So I'm going to walk down the hallway, move myself fluidly down through the project.

Now, we actually use a proprietary algorithm to calculate and generate these navigational hotspots on your behalf. And the intention here is to create something that has a very kind of natural, walkable sequence to it. And, as you can see, it's very intuitive, just kind of moves through the space. And no manual intervention was required. This is all automated.

In fact, the entire viewing experience that we're looking at here, both inside of the browser viewer, which we're looking at together now, and in the headset experience if you're looking at this in something like a Quest 2, has been designed from the ground up to be very comfortable and very intuitive for nontechnical users. This is designed for your clients to be able to use with next to no learning curve and with minimal chance of nausea or any other discomfort with VR.

Now, remember, we also have the floor plan as we had generated earlier. And, as you can see, our floorplan from Revit has been transformed into a navigation tool. We can jump around nonlinearly to any point inside of the project with a simple tap. So let's go and pop back to the other side of the project. And here we are into a presentation room. And we're going to work our way back around to the start of the project.

Now you notice the augmented reality object. And there were a few of them that were actually added in. We can kind of see there's some hotspots that have been automatically injected for those. So we're not going to look at those right now, just wanted to show you that those have been automatically created for us. And they've been placed over the objects that were tagged.

Now, that's it. We've got a fully navigable VR project. It is client ready. It's headset ready. And this was all done with no special training, no complex or proprietary rendering settings. And you've basically got a business-ready VR project ready to go. And all it took was a couple of clicks.

Now, I know some of you are probably looking at this and going, wait a minute. We're pretty invested in a whole bunch of different renders. We've got established workflows. What happens? Well, not to worry, we've taken this into account. You can still take full advantage of everything we've shown you with Yulio. In fact, we've built this entire pipeline from the ground up to be compatible with the most popular third-party renderers. So what you can do is you use Yulio exactly as we've just demonstrated here to go and create the project.

You can then swap in alternative renders for the individual scenes using the render pipeline of your choice. What Yulio does is it maintains all of that project metadata. So we create and maintain the navigational hotspots, the floorplan-based navigation, the augmented reality, any additional annotations that you've created in there. We maintain all of that on your behalf and allow you to swap in the graphics.

So basically, you can go and get whatever look and feel you want for the individual scenes while taking full advantage of Yulio's creation mechanism and all the presentation mechanics that are going to be showing you shortly. So this makes it really easy to integrate into your existing workflows

Now, we all know architects are under incredible pressure now to do more with less to stay competitive. So this render agnostic approach that we've adopted really allows your design team, the highly-trained folks to focus on those hyper-realistic visualizations and to use their choice of tools. But at the same time, it makes it cost effective for practically anyone with basic Revit training to create compelling VR content and to do it pretty much at any stage of the project lifecycle. And that's really the heart of the VR creation process.

Now, I did allude earlier that VR is really only part of the equation. So let's have a look down the road a little bit and see where AR fits into all of this. Now, as anybody who's been reading the tech news knows, augmented reality is coming for our industry like a freight train. It's absolutely exploding in popularity in the consumer realm because it provides that natural, real-world context. So putting that into architectural terms, AR is a medium that allows your client to experience your design in their actual target space.

Now, it's still early days. This is very much still an evolving technology in our domain. But the opportunities for AR in architecture are absolutely endless. The big challenge today is how can you make that technology accessible. So let's look at how Yulio's tackled this.

So you remember earlier that Dana had tagged an item to make it into an AR object. And if we look back at the project for a moment, we see these augmented reality links that are automatically injected into the scene. If I tap on those in my browser, I'm automatically presented with a QR code. Now, my browser on my desktop obviously is incapable of doing AR. We automatically detect that. And we give you this as a way to get that augmented reality experience onto a device that is capable of viewing it. So it can be pretty much any modern phone or tablet.

And what we're going to show you now is exactly what this process looks like using just an off-the-shelf iPad. So we are looking through the lens of an iPad right now. And it's pointing at a QR code that was fired up out of a Yulio VR project just like the one we created. And let's have a look at what happens.

So I point my camera. It automatically detects that there's a QR code. And it says, would you like to view this in augmented reality? The customer hits Yes. Our application maps the 3D. And you can see this happens in seconds. And it brings your object out into the real world. That's all there is to it.

So from the user's perspective, they have the power to look around, examine this from every angle, and really kind of understand it in their context. You'll also notice they've got complete agency over that object. They can move it around, reposition it. So we see them drop it into an alternative location in the space. They're able to rotate it, drop it into final position, and really get a sense for what it would look like in that context.

And again, our focus is always to remove friction. So from your client's perspective, it's incredibly intuitive. It's automatically placed. It's simply dragging and dropping with your finger to move it, manipulate it in their space. Now, if you are using a VR headset, something like a Quest 2, and you open the same experience, we actually provide a full viewing experience dedicated to the headset.

It gives you the ability to walk around the object in six degrees of freedom. You can even swap out different environments, different contexts while you're in this headset, including using the view through cameras. And what you end up with is basically a wearable AR experience. And if you get a chance, try it out on a Quest 2, It's incredibly cool. And it's really kind of pointed the future of wearable AR. Again, still early days, but already a very powerful medium.

So, as you've seen, we've made it really simple. And now this is both on the authoring side, the content creation side directly from Revit, but also on the delivery side and getting a natural, intuitive way for your client to actually experience AR.

So we've covered creation. Now let's look at the next step-- enhancing your project. Now, the key here is you're not always going to be there to speak to your work. But you still want to maintain control of the narrative. With Yulio, you can enhance your projects with a huge range of annotations to help guide your clients through your work when you're not there.

You can add audio, video narratives. You can add ambient audio sound tracks. You can drop in contextual images. You can drop in contextual text. You can even link out to external resources to help you support any sort of key ideas that you've got in your design. And it really is that easy. It's a drag-and-drop interface. You just open up your project inside the Yulio Editor, drag your assets in. And you can have fully annotated projects.

So we've got a client here. This is actually a real-world example that we'd like to show you. So this is a familiar brand. Cisco's been using Yulio to present their product showcases. They have an incredibly robust line of technologies for integrating into modern offices. And they've created this fully immersive VR experience that runs in headsets. They show this at trade shows. They use it out in technical sales to show off their technology.

Now, it also needs to be able to run in a standalone form. And you can see there's a bunch of annotations in here. So some of these are technical points. They're describing nuances of how their technology can integrate into that location. The audio track up here is really fascinating. It actually describes how they were able to save like 4,000 pounds of steel out of the roof in this environment by eliminating the need for conduits.

And then, of course, you can do things like this. They've created some absolutely breathtaking video content. And they've linked it into Yulio. And they've got these fly-throughs, again, demonstrating their technology. Now, we're looking at this obviously in a browser. If we were on a headset, this is also viewable inside of a stereoscopic VR headset.

What happens is this basically pops up. And it looks like you're looking at an IMAX version of this video. So everything that we're looking at is both viewable on a browser on desktop and phone and inside of a 3D headset. Some beautifully crafted content there.

Now again, the advantage here is, your client is able to follow your design narrative without having to come out of that VR environment. Everything that we just looked at is linked into this common experience. So you don't have to be popping into and out of the VR to understand the context of the design-- really powerful.

So we've got one more area. Let's look at the last and most critical hurdle. And that is presenting your design to your client. So it's in the presentation where you really get to realize the ROI. We know presenting in VR is a great way to get client buy in. But traditionally, getting a client into a compelling VR experience can be a little bit challenging. So this is particularly true in our industry when you recognize that 80%, roughly, of client reviews over the course of an architectural project tend to be done remotely.

So really, you need a solution that's going to work both when you can bring your client into the office with you and when you need to go and present to them. And they stay at their offices. So let's look at how Yulio tackles this.

So now, of course, you can always share your project by sharing its URL. So it generates a permalink. You can email it. You can text it. You can put it through social media. But a much more impactful way of sharing your design is through a guided experience. And for that, you can use Yulio's Collaborate feature. So firing off a Collaborate session could not be easier. You pick a project or pick your client, and you initiate Collaborate as I'm showing now.

Now we're going to have Dana. She's on a Oculus Quest 2. And she is actually going to join us in this Collaborate session. So you can see that she's popped in her Quest 2. She's joined our Collaborate. And you can have a one-to-one experience, or you can have one to many. We could have a dozen different headsets. You can join on either desktop, phone, or headset. And Yulio takes care of creating a common experience for everybody.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start following Dana. What we're looking at in real time is exactly what she is seeing on a VR headset. And she is obviously remote to this discussion. And she has full navigational control. So she can go and walk us down the hallway exactly like we were demonstrating earlier. And she can free roam as we look over her shoulder. And she shares our thoughts with us. So what are you loving about this? What are you not loving? So we're in this real collaboration now.

We also have presentation tools to further control the narrative. So at any point, I can take control over again. And I can say, hey, listen, let's kind of look over here. There was a detail of the handle design that you'd missed. And using our spotlight feature, we can draw everybody's attention to that particular feature. What she saw in her headset was a smooth fade through block. And then her eye was drawn automatically to whatever it is that I brought attention to.

Another thing that we can do is, if we are collecting feedback in real time, I can take control back and say, you know what, let me jot that down. And for this we can use our Markup feature. To enable Markup. And, as you can see, we've actually added in a markup from earlier. I'm go and add in another markup. Let's say we wanted to go and highlight that the customer was not at all happy with maybe some of the furniture layout in here.

Now, as I'm doing this markup, everybody who's participating in this session is seeing this added in real time. And you've got to see this in a headset. It's really powerful because they literally see this drawing suddenly appear in 3D in their field of view. Now, as the author of this, I can also take notes. I can come in here and say, you know what? Client really didn't like these-- replace with spotlights.

This feedback is saved directly into the virtual reality project. So it is maintained as part of the data set. So when I close this, I'm going to be able to share this with my design team later on. And I can kind of turn it off, so it doesn't get in the way of my ongoing presentation.

So again, we focused on taking the complexity out of presenting VR. And we've really focused on this from two perspectives-- from your perspective as the author and the storyteller, but also from your client's perspective to make this very unintimidating and natural for them.

So now, of course, there are going to be times where you need to present, not just a single project, but a whole series of projects. So you're going to be working on a design over the course of a larger initiative. So you're going to have designs and design iterations you're going to share with your customers. So to help you manage this, we've created something new. And that's the Yulio Client Gallery.

So you can think of this as your client's personal VR portal. As you create VR content, you simply add it to your client's gallery. And it's instantly and securely made available to them. And they can view it on their browser, on desktop, on their phone, or on any connected headset. Now, of course, you are always in control.

You dictate exactly what content is available through the portal for each client. You can add. You can remove. You can update VR projects. And the moment that you do that in real time, those changes are published to the portal and are made available to your client. If they have a connected headset, that new VR project is pushed to the headset. And it's ready to go as soon as they're ready to view it.

Now we've got some customers that have really embraced this feature. They send out inexpensive Quest 2 headsets as part of pretty much every RFP response or proposal. They literally just send it out as part of their pitch. And when they're trying to win the project, they share portfolio work. They show early ideation designs of what's possible. And they engage their customers early. When they've won the job, they just transition that same investment of that headset to sharing real projects. So sharing the design work from concept to shovel ready through the entire lifecycle of that project.

So the Client Gallery, all your client needs to do is keep their headset charged up. We've taken care of the rest of it for you. They don't have to get IT involved. There's no kind of complex setup. Run the Yulio app, keep the headset juiced, and they're able to go and experience your virtual reality content from anywhere.

Now, I saved the best for last. Client Galleries feature is completely free. You can create as many of these galleries as you need to serve your customers. So create one at each stage of your projects, create one for every customer. There's no additional cost to you above your basic subscription.

So that's what I wanted to show you today. We've cleared all three of the key barriers to practical VR and AR-- the creation, the enhancement, and the presentation. And now that you've seen how simple it can be to get that positive ROI out of VR and AR, I'm really hoping that you're inspired to give this a try in your practice.

So if you're looking to get started, we've got our Client Success Manager's contact information up here on the screen. But of course, you can always just head over to Yulio.com, sign up for a free trial. And I hope you found this useful. And we can't wait to see what you come up with Thanks, everybody, for your time.