How architects are using VR to give building tours before a brick is laid

Architect Vincent McIlduff is often in a world of his own. Wearing an HTC Vive headset over his eyes, the Irish architect may well be physically present in his office but in (virtual) reality, he is on site at his latest design project.

Not only does he see an exact rendering of what he has designed, he can become totally immersed in it, able to interact and explore. Two sensors in the form of small black boxes track his movements so his alter ego can also walk around, sit, bend and get down on hands and knees. Whichever way he looks, the screen on his face follows and the picture he sees shifts accordingly. It shows him a different perspective of his design and gives him the same field of view as if he were looking around a real space.

He can walk from one virtual room to another, from floor to floor and from indoors to out. He can turn on taps, switch lamps on and off and open doors. He can change everything about his project down to the smallest detail, including lighting, colour, furniture and finishes.

In projects such as villas in Lombok, Indonesia, where the view is important, he uses an on-site 3D camera to take photos of the surroundings and superimposes those images into the VR model. When you look outside the virtual window, what you see is what you are actually going to get.

“Designers can now build rooms in the same way that gamers build worlds,” says McIlduff, who came to Hong Kong with Dutch architectural firm OMA in 2011 and set up his own company, Alt-254, five years ago. “The technology gives me a 3D idea of the space – such as how high the ceilings are – so I can experience exactly what it feels like to be inside that particular design as well as see it. The virtual images and the actual end result are very similar.”