New Rochelle, the seventh most populous city in New York, has introduced an immersive virtual reality platform that will serve as an instrumental public engagement and input tool as the city embarks on transformative planned redevelopment projects. The experience will enable residents to better experience, via 360-degree views, nearly 3 million square feet of proposed

In October 2018, Switzerland-based 3-D-graphics software company Imverse released a public beta version of its LiveMaker modeling tool. This powerful virtual reality interface allows for the transformation of 2-D inputs into immersive 3-D environments. While the use of VR in the field of architecture and design is by no means novel, it has primarily remained a tool for

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is being applied to a broad range of applications, from architectural rendering to medical training. Now, retail giant Walmart is introducing the use of Oculus GO headsets to upgrade training at outlets across the country. Walmart plans to ship four of the headsets to every Walmart Supercenter, and two headsets to

FutureVision is R/GA’s trend-spotting division. FutureVision helps keep you connected with the latest information, making it easy for you to stay informed. This cute and simple interactive narrative is underpinned by complex technology. Described by Google as a “mobile movie theater,” Spotlight Stories combines 3D and 2D animation with 360-degree spherical video. The app also uses

Imverse, a Switzerland-based 3D computer graphics company, is pushing forward with immersive virtual reality experiences with potential architectural applications. Imverse’s Elastic Time, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, is a mixed reality documentary experience that allows the user to see their own body hologram with unlimited freedom of movement. The volumetric 3D environment provides

Medusa Pioneer Works 159 Pioneer Street Brooklyn, New York Through April 16 High in the rafters of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, a digital display too kinetic and dynamic to exist in the real world swims through space. As Medusa ebbs and flows, seafoam-green square slats shoot from the 40-foot-tall ceiling all the way to ground

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you won’t be visiting Venice any time soon. But that’s fine, neither will I. You might have heard that the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, one year delayed, kicked off in late May to significantly smaller crowds—and presumably a significantly smaller Aperol bill—than usual. You might have also heard

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the hottest thing in art right now; digital artist Beeple sold an aggregated collage of his work, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, for $69.3 million on March 11 (though there are questions of whether the buyer also made money on the sale), and even media companies are turning their articles into sellable NFTs. Now, Toronto-based artist Krista Kim has

The New Museum’s NEW INC and Onassis USA, the American outpost of the Greek arts organization, have announced a new joint venture focused on mixed reality projects. Called ONX Studio (for Onassis, NEW INC eXtended Reality Studio), the project will begin as a two-year pilot program and will function as an accelerator, workspace, and gallery

Software company Morpholio, which blends virtual hand drafting with virtual reality features in its Trace programs, launched Shadow Maker on March 22. A new feature for the iPhone and iPad app Morpholio Trace, Shadow Maker can place models in their real-world solar conditions. Trace is just one part of the company’s app suite and is

In recent years, experiments in architecture have produced forms, moods, and effects that resist easy labeling. Still, some have tried putting a name to this diverse, variegated work: the “postdigital.” The term was first popularized by the British architect Sam Jacobs, who considered postdigital drawing (often taking the form of collage) to be a meaningful

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

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is staging its first virtual reality exhibition, Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media, created by Space Popular and curated by Shumi Bose. How architectural styles change and combine, and are propelled by media—etchings, magazines, Pinterest—is at the center of Space Popular‘s dizzying installation, and the changes in the

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

Forensic Architecture has garnered a significant reputation within the field of architecture (they had a major showing at the most recent Chicago Architecture Biennial) and beyond for their work reconstructing violent events perpetrated by state actors and others using architectural tools and emerging technologies. The collective’s work has been displayed everywhere from the courthouse to

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

Kerenza Harris is the director of design technology at Morphosis, where she works across the firm to integrate advanced computational techniques and high-tech simulations throughout the design process. Ahead of her presentation on system-based design processes and extended reality at TECH+ in Los Angeles next week, AN caught up with Harris to get her takes

“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

The late Michael Graves has seen his previously unbuilt work finally realized in a virtual reality environment thanks to Imagined Landscapes. The interactive sightseeing experience was created by Kilograph, a Los Angeles creative studio that has worked with firms like Gensler and Zaha Hadid Architects. Based on Graves’s painted plans for the unbuilt Canary Islands

Construction remains one of the most dangerous careers in the United States. To stop accidents before they happen, construction companies are turning to emerging technologies to improve workplace safety—from virtual reality, drone photography, IoT-connected tools, and machine learning. That said, some solutions come with the looming specter of workplace surveillance in the name of safety,

“Movement was always an underlying instigator to how I look at form,” explains architect Amina Blacksher, who began ballet at age six. Her work crosses boundaries and unifies seemingly disparate practices, as she now, among many other things, uses the tools and methods of an architect to investigate the place of robots in our lives

Level 3, number 203. Turn right 10 feet. Go straight for 15 feet. The best way to experience data’s strong grip on everyday life in China is to open up Baidu Maps, a mapping app by China’s biggest search engine company, and walk around a shopping mall for one afternoon. Inside the building, a network

The Swedish multinational construction and development company Skanska is responsible for many of the world’s biggest building projects. Right now in New York City alone, it is overseeing two massive infrastructural and architectural undertakings: The Moynihan Train Hall and the LaGuardia Terminal B redevelopment. The design and construction of these projects are being reshaped by

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

Virtual reality is often an individual experience, with one user shaping and traversing a preprogrammed digital realm. But what if complete strangers could gather together within the virtual realm to construct an architectural edifice? Project Correl is an experiment by the Zaha Hadid Virtual Reality Group(ZHVR) in what it describes as “multi-presence virtual reality,” where users can

To compete with online retailers, brick-and-mortar retailers are turning towards augmented and virtual reality tools to attract consumers. Lowe’s Innovation Labs is experimenting with virtual and augmented reality to boost retail sales. Programs such as Holoroom How-To and Holoroom Test Drive allow users to visualize and experience products prior to purchase. The Innovation Labs are

The process of drawing up architectural plans is in flux. For more than a decade, assorted software programs have attempted to bridge the gap between two and three dimensions by taking flat drawings or field data collected onsite and migrating them into modeling platforms, which create photorealistic renderings or 3-D virtual reality walkthroughs of a

Artist Mel Chin is bringing two new installations to Times Square’s Broadway plazas this summer. Wake and Unmoored are part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-location exhibition produced by the Queens Museum and the public art nonprofit No Longer Empty. Other locations involved with the citywide exhibition are the Queens Museum and the Broadway–Lafayette/Bleeker Street subway station, which is hosting a May

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