Augmented reality and architectural visualization

The augmented reality can boost up the experiences provided in visualization in a way that was only a matter of science fiction a few years ago. I do believe that this is a technology that we will be using to create architectural visualization in the near future, even if this is still a subject that doesn't fit on the workflow of many independent artists and small offices. If you want to see a great example of an augmented reality demonstration for architectural visualization, I recommend a works created by an architecture student from the Valle Giulia faculty of Architecture in Italy.

The artist is called Sorin Voicu and this was his thesis project. You can watch the Augmented Reality for Architecture video in Vimeo in HD, and if you are a registered user, the source file of the video is available to download.

augmented-reality-architecture

In the video we will see the most of the work to create the Augmented reality is related with 2d/3d composition from live footage and 3d animations created in a 3d software. Much of that is possible, because a camera tracking software was used to align the views from the real camera and the 3d camera. If you want to check out a small VFX breakdown of the project, there is a short video showing a lot of the composition work and color correction created for the video.

Can we do that In Blender 3D? Both softwares used for the camera tracking and 3d animation can be replaced by Blender 3d and Voodoo Camera tracking for a similar project.

It's quite nice to see architecture students using such technologies to make presentations of their projects! I still remember that I didn't have such resources to present my graduation project almost ten years ago. My project was a planetarium and all presentation had to be done in printed panels. Things would be much different today!

Since augmented reality is one of the subjects that I will be working on with my students in this next semester, I can promise a few articles about the use of these techniques to make presentations for architecture, with Blender 3D.

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Comments

  • liser

    Hi people!

    Just to tell you that there’s another free tracker called Icarus, very similar to voodoo, but with a mac version too!

    Virgilio, you make a great work here, it’s very useful to me!

    Thanks!

  • Allan Brito

    Hi liser,

    Thanks for the tip.

    But, Virgilio??? I guess you are in the wrong blog! 🙂

  • Noah Zerkin

    Talk to the fine folks at Seac02.it about maybe doing a Blender port of their LinceoVR plugin for Rhino. My near-term vision is of a modeler, I don’t care which, displaying the environment stage relative to an AR reference point (a fiducial point, printed marker or something else) on a see-through HMD, and using a low profile version of my gloves for spawning, placing, modifying, linking, and texturing primitives. Doing it without gloves would be nice, too, but that’s not my domain 😉 Check out the demo vid on my blog for some idea of what I’m getting at. Not yet AR in that incarnation, but it’s in the works.

  • liser

    Sorry Allan, I was thinking about Virgilio Vasconcelos when I wrote the comment!

    Sorry!

  • Arkinauta

    When I readed “Augmented Reality” I was excited because is something I want to use in the final presentation of my project… but sadly, I was expecting to “camera” augmented reality, like in this video:
    http://tiny.cc/ar169

    I did some research about how to do this with our favorite 3d program, and I found ArBlender (http://tiny.cc/arblender). Supposedly a modification of Blender capable of making “camera” augmented realities.

    I had no time to chek it properly (it´s an old project and I find it´s maybe not easy to use) but I find this type of architectural representations also quite interesting.
    Maybe you could try to add this subject into your teaching schelude, and talk us about it 🙂

    Thanks and greetings.

  • Arkinauta

    I can´t edit my other comment.

    If anyone is interested, the link of the ArBlender project is:
    http://www.ai.fh-erfurt.de/start/personen/professoren/prof-dr-paul-grimm/forschung/projekte/arblender.html?L=0&Schriftgroesse=0
    (the other link doesn´t work)

    Greetings.

  • paul

    after the name, that student seems to be a Romanian… good work mate!

  • mahmoud farouk

    hi
    i am very interested in using augmented reality in architectur, i want to ask a qustion to be more understand, i know in the video that the building was virual and the suround site are real (the street-trees-cars),thats rigt or not
    if you have any data about the architecture A.R plz send it to me.
    thx

  • ben

    here’s an AR/architecture video that just came out… also just interesting for arch viz
    http://vimeo.com/11692791

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