How Saddle River Day School, NJ,USA is Using Arkio

[Giridhar_Peddi]

Greeting Arkio Community,

We, The SRDS Rebels are excited to share on how we use Arkio at our School. I am Giri, an upper school computer science teacher. I Co-teach a class, “The VR City Building“ with the Tech Director of our school, Laura Hollis, using Arkio.

We are particularly excited to write and share this community post because we want to show the impact the Arkio team is making in this schools by supporting them, we want to keep the team motivated by sharing our students work, so that they can keep building Arkio with more great features. We also would like to thank Arkio team for supporting our school, SRDS, NJ, USA.

Our high school students are using Arkio to reimagine urban design through the lens of sustainability and futuristic infrastructure. Working in VR with Meta Quest headsets, they’re creating architectural designs that align with UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 11.3, which focuses on inclusive and sustainable urbanization and participatory urban planning. We envisioned a workflow, where all the students design the city in Arkio and 3D print them, so that they can see something tangible and reinforces their creativity and learning.

With Arkio’s super cool VR interface, students get to see their designs in real life, like they’re building buildings themselves! They can use parametric components and volumetric modeling tools to shape things up.

We’re taking these digital creations into the real world by 3D printing selected student designs. This workflow from conceptualization in VR to tangible physical models demonstrates the complete design-to-fabrication pipeline that professional architects and urban planners use today

Please take a look at the images attached below showcasing our workflow, planning and few examples building we developed in Arkio.

One of the students is very proud to develop the palace you see in the images above, and it was even more rewarding when we 3D printed the palace.

For our next steps with the spatial understanding gained through VR helps them make design decisions that account for both ground-level and aerial traffic patterns, essential considerations for cities preparing for flying cars/vehicle integration.

This approach demonstrates how VR design tools like Arkio can help the next generation of urban planners and architects think critically about creating livable, sustainable cities ready for emerging technologies.

We’re incredibly grateful to the Arkio team for building such an accessible and powerful platform that makes immersive design education possible. Your tool has transformed how our students understand spatial relationships, collaborate on complex projects, and envision the future of urban design. The ability to move seamlessly from VR sketching to detailed modeling, and then to physical 3D prints, has given our students a professional-grade workflow that inspires them to think bigger about solving real-world challenges. Thank you for democratizing architectural design tools and supporting the next generation of designers and urban planners.

Best,
Giridhar Peddi
Computer Science Teacher at SRDS

[Johan]

Thank you for sharing your experiences and these great examples, @Giridhar_Peddi!

I see your students were collaborating on a tower design based on a reference image and floorplan. This is an excellent way to learn about the basics of modeling in Arkio together, as there are several ways to make shapes like this using Arkio’s solid and void geometry.

Assignment scenes like this can be shared with all students in a live Arkio meeting or via the Arkio cloud, with all 2D and 3D references loaded on the green table for them to move, copy or create alone or together following the class exercise.

Did you have any further tips or examples of assignments for schools considering using Arkio with their students?

[Annabelle_Berger]

This week, we decided about our city’s footprint and the way that we will be connecting it to the UN’s SDGs. We contemplated the topography of our city; whether it will be flat or hilly, full of trees or barren, etc. We also thought about if our city is going to be fantastical or realistic compared to our world’s cities.

We also discussed what we wanted for arkio to improve upon in the future. We really love Arkio’s building interface and library of assets, but we would like better topographical features, along with the ability to easily add rivers, mountains, and valleys in the future. We also want the ability to add notes into Arkio on top of our buildings. For example, we are currently using Noda to create webs of ideas, and we really want something like that interface to comment on our buildings.

We really appreciate the Arkio team’s commitment to the improvement of the interface, along with giving us the ability to help the app improve for everyone to enjoy!

-The SRDS VR Class

[Liam_Gorelik]

Hello Everyone!

Hope you all are well.

This week in our VR class we figured out how we would transcribe the amazing buildings we make in Arkio into something tangible that we can show in real life. This is the first step in bringing our ideas into reality. Firstly, we assigned one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations onto each individual in our class, maintaining organized responsibilities while making sure that our city would meet all expectations. This would not only allow us to properly create buildings for certain goals, but also allow us to develop expertise in certain topics.

Another interesting topic we discussed was a new Geo-architectural type feature in Arkio that allowed one to fully input the architecture of a major structure, perhaps a city or building, into Arkio so that every infrastructural detail would be included. We have tested this feature out with Times Square and Shibuya Crossing, both examples working perfectly.

We truly appreciate the Arkio team’s commitment to improving the interface, as well as giving us the opportunity to help make the app better for everyone.

-The SRDS VR Class

[sean.ccoyne]

This week we discussed our city’s transportation and navigation design, focusing on how the roads will be laid out and where major buildings will be placed. We compared different styles of city planning, such as New York’s straight, grid-like streets versus cities with more curved and less rigid road systems. This helped us think about how movement through our city will feel and how people will interact with different areas.

We also explored Arkio’s map feature, which allowed us to clearly view and plan out roads within our city. This made it easier to visualize our transportation network and how everything connects. In addition, we talked about possibly using Blender in the future to create more complex objects that could be added to our buildings for extra detail and realism.

We really appreciate the Arkio team and their ongoing commitment to improving Arkio and supporting projects like ours.

• The SRDS VR Class

[CommanderSleepy]

Hello All! This week we are deciding on the layout of our city, specifically the layout of the streets and buildings. We are discussing if it is possible and viable to design roads on Arkio easily, or to design the roads in Blender then import them into our city in Arkio. We are also unsure if Arkio is capable of comfortably running and displaying a landscape object with a significantly large polygon count. We went over the pros and cons of different landscapes and designs, along with the scale of them. We were also considering using different landscapes to adapt to the UN sustainable development goals, which makes adding things like solar farms, an animal reserve, or underwater transportation easier depending on the terrain. We are wondering how to export Blender files and import them into Arkio, specifically the terrain we have chosen for our city. We plan to test this this week!

- The SRDS VR Class

[Johan]

Welcome everyone!

Good to hear about the progress you guys are making towards designing an entire city together using Arkio

Arkio can load large files with many polygons for your landscape designs, if you use a standalone Quest headset, some objects might show less detail for heavy 3D models. You can learn more about this on our support page.

Models from Blender can best be loaded to Arkio, by saving the models from Blender to GLB in your Documents/Arkio/Import folder and starting Arkio on your PC (You can then share this import with you Quest in an Arkio meeting or by connecting to the same Arkio cloud) More information about loading Custom 3D models from Blender and other apps can be found here.

We’d love to see some pictures of the progress if you guys feel comfortable sharing!

[Joy_Chen]

is week, we are preparing the slideshow for the Cook/Fox trip. We also got back into Akrio, each team member chose the building they are going to design based on their UN GOAL. The buildings are the most important factor for the city. We each choose a UN GOAL to decide the purpose of the buildings.

Here is the breakdown:

Joy - Food corner

Sean - Multipurpose Skyscraper

Annabelle - rooftop interactive dog park/apartment building

Vihaan - Solar Farm

Wenbo - HIgh School

JV - Bank/Stock Exchange

Megan - aquarium (maybe under water)

Liam - Education/Innovation center aka labratory

Hollis - Teen center

Peddi - Hospital

Jamie - Energy generating side walks

This Thursday, we went to COOKFOX, an architecture firm located in New York city which we learned actually partnered with Arkio 2 years ago. We heard from professionals who design buildings, meet with urban planners, collaborate with city administrators, and get to ask them questions about their process. We prepared a slide deck about everything we have done in VR and shared our ideas with them. We had lunch with Rick Cook who told us stories and gave us lots of insights about architecture and design. They also gave us some useful advice. Moreover, the experiences they shared with us by showing us their project are very helpful for us.