Case Study

Breaking down walls in A&D with VR

A personally developed stereoscopic cube-map viewer is extended to become a complete SaaS platform used by the A&D and Education sectors to bring traditional flat designs to life in VR with minimal time and costs.

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Project Overview

The software behind the company that is now Yulio began as a personal development project to learn and explore the emerging VR space. It all began with an attempt to take the leanings gained from building a Facebook game around a custom cube-map viewer designed to allow a user to navigate around a puzzle, and attempting to extend the concept to to allow stereoscopic cube-map viewing. Once the initial concept was proven to work we began to look at potential applications for the technology and a partnership with a company already servicing the Architecture and Design domain in crafting detailed sketch and AutoCAD drawings as an online service seemed the perfect fit. A partnership was formed and in 2016, Yulio was born.

Early Days

Yulio began as a technical exploration of VR to see what impact the newly released Google cardboard headsets could give. Quickly we found the value and "wow-factor" created by simply viewing existing cube-map scenes in the immersive VR environment. We however did not want to simply create another travel experience application, as a strategic design and development consultancy we wanted to create real business ROI from the technology. To do this we needed to find readily available and consumable content that could benefit from the immersive value of VR. After talking with friends, co-workers, and clients we found what seemed to be the perfect fit, the A&D community had an abundance of highly skilled CAD creators and a regular cadence of projects. Projects in this domain suffered from the difficulty of communicating the final design to clients using just 2D cad diagrams and artistic still sketches of final designs. The Yulio technology was a perfect fit for portraying the final project design to clients and we quickly moved to build one of the first VR applications for business.

Figure: Example of a single cube-map image

Navigating without buttons

The early days of VR Brough simple and affordable viewing systems like Google Cardboard (early VR viewer). At the time of it's emergence there were very few applications in VR, fewer still that allowed interaction beyond looking at VR videos or single point renders and so interaction with the viewer was often limited to a "look around but don't touch" experience. We were required to break new ground designing navigation techniques if we wanted to be interactive in our designs and have something that would work as the viewing devices changed and evolved over time. After user testing and prototype evaluations were able to craft a gaze based method similar to what is experienced today on Meta and Apple platforms. By centring the navigation element in the persons view and holding the position a count down visually engages before actioning the element. To ensure navigation elements are not distracting we applied size changes on focus and faded navigation points when further from the focal centre. This created a very easy to operate interface users both technical and non technical.

Leveraging the power of Gaming Engines

When building a new systems and concepts it is important to look to other fields to see what systems or components can be leveraged in new ways. For Yulio we were looking to create a method to allow scene authors and sales teams to see what their viewers are experiencing in their scenes. This was critical to ensure that when using the viewer in sales presentations or teaching scenarios that the creator could function as a guide and discuss elements that each individual may be looking at. To do this we looked to game engines which are purpose built to share in real time position and direction of players in game. Using the same logic we were able to craft a session connection between one or more VR viewers and a 3D moderator view which would show not only where each viewer was in the experience but where they were focusing.

Diagram of Yulio VR group interaction methods

Cut the straps!

Early in the process we uncovered an key issue with today's headsets. When bringing VR experiences to a sales meetings, user's were often wary of strapping on a headset and losing connection to the room around them. Our simple solution... cut the straps! Once the straps were removed from the headsets users could pick it up, quickly experience the scene and put it back down to continue discussions. This simple solution had an immediate impact on the adoption.

Building a visual editor

In order to build a VR/3D tour editor it was important to use the power of the viewer itself in order have a good sense for how the navigation would feel. We created an interface that allowed the user to move linearly or non-linearly through their scenes and then, using a WSIWIG interface drag hotspots and interactive onto the scene. Each of these interactive could then be set and various "depths" within the scene ensuring the feeling of three dimensions would remain. Of course when representing in VR these interactive navigation elements were then displayed with appropriate left eye vs right eye offsets.

Closing the loop with Analytics

We strongly felt that it was important to track traditional page/app anlaytics elements like viewers are coming from, their technology, and which scenes the use, but also to how they interact with the contents of the scenes. In order to track the how, we looked to heat tracking with in the scenes itself. This tracking aided experience designers in determining which areas of their Yulio experiences are getting the most visual attention. This can help in finding points of interest or potentially points of confusion for the viewer. These targets can then be annotated or refined if there are issues, or for points of interest they can be replicated in future designs.

Learnings

A broad collection of experiences in different vertical markets is important when building innovative products. Repurposing technology from one vertical into another market can have great impact.
User testing is the only true way to explore navigation techniques when targeting a diverse user base.
Spending time to tune and optimize interfaces is critical to making systems with lasting appeal.
Simple solutions like ‘cutting the straps’ can often have the biggest impacts!

Impact

Today, Yulio continues to evolve it’s position in the A&D project pipeline with the addition of features such as doll house navigation, easy one click exports from popular CAD tools, embedded VR product inspection, and many more features. Yulio has become a key tool for the Architecture community to use in communicating designs to clients, shortening the sales and design approval processes one VR experience at a time.

The carefully planned and crafted interaction experience has ensured that the platform has been able to support each new advancement of VR headsets from Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR, to today’ sand Meta Quest headsets.

https://yulio.com

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