Thank you for joining us at Forge Partner Talks: AR/VR. We enjoy showcasing new and exciting solutions built by our partners, and hope seeing theirs has inspired you to build your own or leverage existing technologies. We did receive quite a few questions and were unfortunately unable to get to all of them, so our panelists have answered them for you below.
See how leading Autodesk partners are bringing Forge-powered AR/VR solutions to the design and make space - and learn how these solutions can benefit you.
Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR, joined us with Phil Pleiss, BIM Application Specialist from Merrick & Company, to chat about how VR meeting software is changing how the AEC industry collaborates today.
Then we took a look into the future of AR with Alexandre Piro, Development Engineer at PIRO-CIE. He shared how PIRO-CIE is developing digital applications that leverage augmented reality and all the competitive advantages that AR can bring to your company.
Watch the recording
Q&A
How does information from the VR headset eventually make it back to my Revit design team? What's the feedback loop?
Within the VR meeting all annotations left on the model are synced back to BIM 360 issues. You can then use the issues integration for Revit to see what needs updating within the Revit environment. Additionally, you get an auto-generated PDF and CSV report of annotations made in VR so you can follow up in the model.
- Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR
How do you get around the view that many executive directors and project leaders have, who believe that VR/AR is for the younger generation of workers?
This is one of the main challenges when working today with augmented reality: democratize this technology to all generations of people. This is why we worked mainly last year on AR for mobile, because we think that we need to show AR/VR is easy to use and accessible. So everyone can try it and make his opinion about these technologies. And for people/companies already convinced, we develop on more sophisticated technologies such as HoloLens.
- Alexandre Piro, Development Engineer at PIRO-CIE
How big a model can I load to InsiteVR? What is your timeline to make large file support available?
InsiteVR will be launching something new in the next few weeks to handle large models on the Oculus Quest. We have tested up to 500 million polygons on the Oculus Quest. Please contact me at angel@insitevr.com if you're interested in early access.
- Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR
Does PIRO CIE support the Hololens 2? What other hardware does PIRO-CIE support?
We support augmented reality development on mobile device such as smartphone and tablets (Android and iOS). And Microsoft HoloLens 1st and 2nd gen. We can also work (if needed) on some others hardware such as Daqri or MagicLeap but we don’t have a lot of experience on these devices because of a lack of customers using it.
- Alexandre Piro, Development Engineer at PIRO-CIE
When I use my iPhone and look at a window, can I see transparency and see through a glass window in AR?
Yes we can keep existing materials, and transparent materials work in augmented reality. So we can see through a window in AR. This is a very useful feature we use during AR immersion on site to get future window’s view!
- Alexandre Piro, Development Engineer at PIRO-CIE
How was Angel streaming the BIM to the headset?
All BIM data is sent to the headset over Wifi.
- Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR
Can you share your long-term plans/roadmap to integrate with BIM 360-based model coordination? That is: identifying, analyzing, annotating, and resolving clashes in real-time while immersed in VR.
Last year we built a functioning prototype of an integration with BIM 360 model coordination. We worked directly with the Autodesk Model Coordination team to get early access to the APIs so that you can quickly review clashes from the MC module in VR. As more companies begin using cloud model coordination we will begin integrating it into our product.
- Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR
What challenges did Forge solve that other services could not?
Forge is one of the best technology to convert and work with many different file format. And even with this wide panel of file formats, we can keep all the data from CAD editors. Forge API’s are really efficient and developers can highly customize Forge applications.
- Alexandre Piro, Development Engineer at PIRO-CIE
Forge enables us to focus on delivering a polished VR collaboration product instead of focusing on plugins to extract data from source like Revit or Navisworks. Additionally, with Forge we now support over 70+ different file formats without having to create our own integrations for these formats.
- Angel Say, CEO and Co-Founder of InsiteVR
Forge Partner Talks Series
Look for a new panel discussion every Wednesday in May at 7 am PST/4 pm CET.
Wednesday May 27: Dashboards & Insights (register here)
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