Collaborative VR company The Wild buys IrisVR’s Prospect

Prospect, the first virtual reality program for architects and engineers that allows users upload design files from Rhino, Revit, and more and explore them digitally and at human-scale, has a new home. Today, February 25, The Wild, a company focused on collaborative AR and VR for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries, announced that it had acquired. Prospect from parent company IrisVR.Prospect’s

A timber interior with a spiral staircase and large plate glass windows.
Architects apply the latest in fabrication, design, and visualization to age-old timber

Every so often, the field of architecture is presented with what is hailed as the next “miracle building material.” Concrete enabled the expansion of the Roman Empire, steel densified cities to previously unthinkable heights, and plastic reconstituted the architectural interior and the building economy along with it. But it would be reasonable to question why

A person using an iPad to view AR effects over a model of the BAMPFA.
Luisa Caldas uses AR to let DS+R’s BAMPFA tell its own story

Luisa Caldas is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she leads the XR Lab, focused on using augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and other extended reality tools as part of architectural practice. Recently, Caldas created the Augmented Time exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), housed in

An iPhone that shows floating bottles and other digital artifacts with white text on black scribbles that reads "Boss: you're late Me: I saw a dog Boss: you said that yesterday Me: he lives in my house”
Curatorial collective augments MoMA with an AR exhibition

“There’s so much modern and contemporary art that isn’t shown,” the mononymous artist Damjanski said as we walked around the fifth-floor galleries of MoMA, iPhones in hand. “What if we could bring even more in?” Along with Monique Baltzer and David Lobser, Damjanski has come up with a solution to these limitations with MoMAR, an

Image of iPad with architectural visualization on it
Unity creates new open source tool just for architects with Reflect

Video game software suites like Unreal Engine and Unity have made their way into the architectural arsenal with AEC firms like Skanska, Foster + Partners, and Zaha Hadid Architects using them to visualize and test new buildings. However, these tools weren’t necessarily built with AEC professionals in mind and while they often result in nice-looking

A laptop with a window open showing furniture
Morpholio brings Board software to desktop with expanded pro-features and VR

Morpholio, the architect-turned-developer-run company known for its Trace app that blends augmented reality, digital hand drafting, and other architectural tools on portable devices, has brought its interior design program, Board, to desktops for the first time.  Coming on the heels of the new Mac Catalina operating system update, the desktop version of Board leverages the

A 3D person in a colorful suit with a large disk for a head stands on top of a high rise.
Apple and New Museum team up for choreographed urban AR art tours

New York’s New Museum, which has already launched a fair share of tech-forward initiatives like net-art preservation and theorization platform Rhizome and NEW INC, has teamed up with Apple over the past year-and-a-half to create a new augmented reality (AR) program called [AR]T. New Museum director Lisa Phillips and artistic director Massimiliano Gioni selected artists

Architect creates app to change how exhibitions are designed

For all the advances in technology over the past decade, the experience of curating and viewing museum shows has remained relatively unchanged. Even though digital archive systems exist and have certainly helped bring old institutions into the present, they have relatively little influence over the ways museum shows are designed and shared. The normal practice

A view of different textures on a 3D rendering of a sculpture
A French startup is using drones and AI to save the world’s architectural heritage

Now active in over 30 countries around the world, French startup Iconem is working to preserve global architectural and urban heritage one photograph at a time. Leveraging complex modeling algorithms, drone technology, cloud computing, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI), the firm has documented major sites like Palmyra and Leptis Magna, producing digital versions of at-risk sites at

Morpholio Trace adds augmented reality to its arsenal

This past year was a big one for Morpholio, whose app Trace was named an Apple “App of the Day” and a top app in education, design, and drawing. Now, with iOS 12’s updated augmented reality (AR) functionality, the company is pushing the iPad’s architectural sketching abilities further, and closer to (almost) real space. The app

Seoul’s Robot Science Museum will be its own first exhibition

The soon-to-be-built Robot Science Museum in Seoul, South Korea, will be a robotics exhibition itself. The museum, to be designed by Turkish firm Melike Altınışık Architects (MAA), will be built by robots when construction begins next year. In this way, the construction of the building itself will be the museum’s “first exhibition,” according to principal

Blipper is using AR to ease interior navigation

Navigating vast infrastructure and retail hubs, as well as urban environments, can prove to be a daunting task. Blippar, a London-based technology company, is easing wayfinding in these environments through AR-technology. In 2017, Blippar launched ARCity – AR Navigation, an app that allows users to explore hundreds of cities across the world. The app runs

Immersive technology may be architecture’s best tool for communication

This year’s Tech+ conference—an upcoming and groundbreaking event showcasing technological innovators in the AEC industry taking place on May 22 in New York City—will feature pioneering speakers that are rethinking existing technological paradigms. Among them is Iffat Mai, practice application development leader for Perkins + Will, who will be co-presenting a discussion about enhanced realities and immersive experiences. As