Using Arkio to Support Job Recruitment

[TVAjay]

We’ve been using Arkio to show industrial prospects what their facilities might look like if they chose to locate on one of our communities’ industrial-zoned properties while standing on the site. Here are a couple of examples:

MR Presentation 1

MR Presentation Example 2

Some of the challenges we have is that these models are very large. We routinely work with 250k, 500k, and 1M+ square foot facilities on sites ranging from 20 acres to hundreds of acres. Even though our buildings are conceptual level design, it can be challenging to keep the poly count down.

It also seems more difficult that it could be to get realistic materials and textures. I’m hoping to find a better workflow than what we’ve been using. We typically use Lumion and/or Unreal Engine rendering software to render 3D stills and videos of projects. I realize VR headsets are essentially mobile hardware, but if we could get closer to the fidelity of the materials and textures in Arkio it would help make our presentation visuals more cohesive across media types.
Lumion still:

Unreal Engine still:

Another challenge I’m hoping to find a solution to, is how to keep the model properly scaled and geolocated for on-site mixed reality presentations with Arkio. In the example above, I was using a manual process to get the model “close”. While I’ve learned how to “lock” the model in MR now, It would still be nice if it were possible to geolocate the model on the desktop ahead of time like it is currently possible to do with Adobe Aero:
Adobe Aero Example
I believe Adobe is using Google’s Geospatial Creator API to geolocate the model. Unfortunately, Aero only runs on phones and tablets and there appear to be no plans for Aero to support AR/ MR headsets. But I think that represents an opportunity for Arkio. I know a lot of architects/landscape architects who would love to hand a headset to a client and the model just “pops” into place where it’s supposed to be on site and at the proper scale. I think that’s what’s missing from the marketplace. If scale, geolocation, great-looking materials were much less tedious than they seem to be right now, I think we could see much broader adoption of AR across the design industry. I think Arkio is in the lead and has the best chance right now to make that a reality.

My last wish-list item is to make it easier to explore large models / sites in Mixed reality. I would love to put a client / decision maker in a headset and drive them around a 100 acre site in a side-by-side ATV and show them their 500k sq. ft. facility from all sides. I think it would be REALLY cool to be in a helicopter and hand a mixed-reality headset to a CEO and ask him or her to look out the window to see their facility on one of our community’s sites. I believe it is possible, and a company like Arkio could deliver that kind of experience one day. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share and learn from this community. I welcome any tips or tricks anyone is willing to share that could help me simplify our workflow and improve the visual quality of our models. Thank you!

[Johan]

Super nice use case Jay! I love how you are using ATV’s to get around these large sites and pop on some Quest headsets in the field with clients. Thank you for sharing these examples and ideas with the Arkio community.

We’ve heard the request for geospatial anchoring from other users and are looking into solutions that would make it possible to share the world’s position across all our supported devices. Big tech companies (Google, Meta, Apple) are now all working on their own AR anchoring standards but we hope that these standards will one day converge into one cross-platform standard (like OpenXR did for VR headsets) so that we can then utilize this on all devices.

We have plans to improve Arkio’s rendering on mobile devices in our coming versions which will make the models look better. This is heavily restricted by hardware and battery capabilities so it would be difficult to make it look exactly like desktop realtime or raytraced rendering solutions.

Supporting large-scale mixed reality should become possible in time as this depends on tracking technology powering these devices. We know Meta is actively working on improving their tracking and anchoring systems to support much larger spaces that should make it possible to walk/drive across a larger site but looking outside from a helicopter might be a bit too challenging for the tracking to work well!

I would love to hear what others in the Arkio community think about this example. There might be some nice contrasting examples of other-sized designs loaded in mixed reality

[YaakovFefer]

Jay,
I’ve been using Arkio on sites to present project to clients. I’ve had the same limitations with realistic materials and shadows. I found an acceptable solution. I use 3DS max to export a GLB model with baked lighting and use the GLB file on the headset. There should also be a way to export a similar baked lighting file from Unreal, but I wasn’t able to achieve that yet.