Extending reality in design

How AR and VR technologies are changing your local office space

By Kate Hayden

Photos by Duane Tinkey

The role of office space is changing rapidly -- from the pre-pandemic trend of open-layout concept to brand-new practices designed to return some employees safely to a shared office in the COVID-19 pandemic’s aftermath. How will new technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality affect the design process of those office spaces, and what should property owners know before using these technologies themselves? 

The Business Record spoke to three Central Iowa experts: 

Ryan Tow, partner, 3D artist and motion designer at Studio Iowa.

Sean Page, architect at RDG
Design & Planning.

Brittany Freund, vice president at R&R Real Estate Advisors at the time of this conversation; now senior vice president of commercial real estate at WB Realty. 

Read below for an excerpt of the Business Record’s conversation with Tow, Page and Freund, or visit
https://www.businessrecordarem.com for a full podcast recording of the
conversation. 

Can you define the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality? 

Ryan Tow: Virtual reality gives you the ability to immerse yourself in the space, you put the goggles on, you look around and that’s what you see. With augmented reality, you’re using a phone, you’re using a tablet or you’re using a Microsoft HoloLens -- some kind of head-mounted device that’s allowing you to put an overlay on top of the world, and you’re mixing those things together. 

The industry is starting to drift towards XR, calling it “extended reality,” because there’s ways to mix these things together. … Ultimately, I think that these are tools for us to be able to define and show somebody something that’s hard to otherwise say. 

As for what we see in our business, right now it’s tilting towards virtual reality. AR is coming and it’s going to be all over us, but it’s still really emerging. There’s a lot of things that have to work out in the hardware, in terms of people’s understanding and delivery of it.  

There’s no substitute for VR to put you even in a really basic environment. You can understand spatial things; the way things fit together spatially makes sense in a way that you can’t really understand. We know that most people can’t read plan drawings. That’s a really great use of it -- someone suddenly goes, “Oh, I can understand what this thing is now.”

Can you talk about common use cases in your industries?

Brittany Freund: Pre-pandemic, R&R decided to get the Matterport camera and software to create virtual tours of our vacant spaces. That was an amazing decision because it was so helpful during the pandemic when people weren’t leaving their houses, but we could still get them into the space. 

Virtually, this has been seen a lot in residential real estate where you can click on the house and the link, you can walk through the house and see it without actually having to leave the comfort of your home. That’s becoming more widely used in commercial real estate. Commercial real estate could really benefit from ... showing tenants what the space could look like with new features, rather than what it currently looks like, just to help them visualize down the road that this could be your space. I don’t think it’s being used widely in that capacity at this time, and part of that may just be cost. 

How do these tools highlight features to clients? 

Freund: We work with clients [seeking office space] anywhere from 600 square feet to 100,000 square feet. The majority of tenants that we’ve been working with are 3,000 to 5,000 square feet. Working with a standard prospect, we’ll bring them through the space. We have designers who will lay out their space in AR/VR how [clients] want it to look. They’ll basically do a design plan and we’ll share that with them.

Part of that is cost: How much are you going to spend each time, and for what size of client? We just haven’t quite gotten to that real virtual reality, where they can put on the goggles and see the space with finishes like they’re in it. 

In commercial real estate, sometimes their needs are changing so rapidly [that] they’re not always sure exactly of what they need even when they’re out looking for the space. It’s really hard for people who aren’t working in this on a daily basis to really visualize what it’s going to look like. 

How do you highlight new features with AR/VR? 

Sean Page: We’ve had projects in the past where we will go and take the drone out to a fourth-floor window height, and we’ll do a stereoscopic view around and put that into our system. We’ll tell an owner, “If you’re on the fourth floor in your corner office, this is the view of downtown Minneapolis that you’re going to get from this space.” Those are selling features that you can provide. 

You can see in virtual reality where your HVAC system is going to have a cold spot or a hot spot [in an office], or lighting intensity levels. We use those things inside a space to show people that sunshade on this side of the building would be really good because you’re going to cook if we don’t provide something there for you. It’s all about trying to mitigate expectations and make sure that people understand what they’re going to be getting. 

Tow: At first it was amazing that we could send an email of an image and not have to ship it. Now we’ve gone all the way down the road where we can screen-share, and one of the big things is the ability that these [images] are happening in real time. You can get hung up on whether it’s AR, VR, XR, but fundamentally the ability to have graphics happening in real time is one of the things that’s revolutionizing this. 

We can’t forget this is all video game technology that we’re using. It’s video games that are pushing these things forward, that’s giving us now business cases for creating these things. The work that [Studio Iowa] is doing is creating work in Unreal Engine, which is the same thing that’s used for Fortnite. … We’re able to get to the finished product faster and let people make informed decisions. I think once you can get someone engaged in that selection process visually, and have that instantaneous feedback, it saves so many loops of email chains and everything else. 

How will this technology influence office design in the future, especially following the pandemic’s influence? 

Page: VR/AR can come back and say this is what it’s going to look like when you reduce the capacity of your space by 45%, because you can only have one desk for every three you used to have. 

What we’re seeing is being able to lay spaces out and say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” We did the same thing with our office, we went through iterations, we used some AI to lay those out and where people could go.

Freund: We’re seeing a lot of larger tenants pushing back the time when they’re bringing their employees back to the office. It just seems to continue to be pushed back later and later in 2021. A lot of them are looking at those decisions now, and how they can make changes to their office space to make it more COVID-friendly or healthy. … We really rely on our designers, architects like Sean, to help make some of those decisions in laying them out. 

One of the things that’s kind of a trend is compartmentalizing, creating areas where they have their own workspace, they have their own printers, they don’t have to all go use the same one in the same communal area. It’s funny because prior to COVID, I think the trend was creating these areas of connection, and now we’re trying to separate people. 

Tow: We have a condo project right now where we’re looking at doing a touchscreen configurator in a sales center. [We’re able] to build out the model, let it run in real time and then a potential buyer can come up and touch the screen, be able to select finishes and move through that space. … But again, one of the concerns we’ve seen in the last year is in a pandemic, not a lot of people want to put your VR headset on. 

The day I gave a presentation on the VR experience [in 2020], that was the day things got weird in the United States. About a week later we talked to a client who had just gone to a trade show with a 50-inch touchscreen experience, and all of a sudden, no one wanted to touch a screen. You work for six months on something, and no one wants to touch it. 

Are people going to be open to VR again? 

Tow: I hope so, because one of my favorite things is giving people their first taste of VR -- just getting people in our office and putting the headset on them, watching them go, “Oh, wow.” I think it’s going to come back. I think we’re going to get to the point where it’s normalizing. This is all still emerging technology. Five years from now, it’ll probably be a little more normal.

It feels a little bit like being a web designer in 1994. Everyone knows it’s going to be a big thing, but there aren’t a lot of people doing it yet. Even when we go to conventions and conferences and listen to people talk about this, even the people that make the game engines are saying, “We’re excited to see what you guys come up with.” There aren’t really a set of rules yet, especially as we talk about designing experiences and not just showing spaces. … If I can make somebody experience the thing, that’s going to be a powerful story. We think there’s an opportunity, especially as demand grows and we see different kinds of real estate products happen over the next 20 years. 

Page: That’s more important for the architectural industry than ever. 

With our 3D setup, our laptop and our goggles, we actually travel with that to owners, and we’ll be able to put owners and ownership groups on-site and do exactly what Ryan’s talking about. The power is immense, and you can get so many different people engaged. That’s what really sells, right? 

If you can show somebody the windows and how it’s going to function, how it’s going to flow, what it’s going to look like to be an open office space -- everybody gets excited about different things. As long as you’re making sure you’re communicating with your client or your real estate group, to be able to provide that experience for them -- if you’re paying attention, you can do that no matter what the project is, even for just an office build-out. 

Freund: When companies are spending so much money for the final project, it’s hard to get them really excited in the beginning of the process when they’re picking out little swatches. This is what’s really going to get them excited. They’re not just looking through a book and picking out one piece of carpet. They can see how it’s laid out and different iterations, different styles of layout, and make that decision ahead of time. When they move in they’re not disappointed in the selections that they’ve made, because they’re spending a lot of money to have these. 

Page: We’ve done that in two dimensions: Here is the carpet, the different variations in color and pattern that we’re going to use; we’re going to use a bright yellow on a wall here because maybe it corresponds with the logo -- then they instantly kind of recoil. … Now, you can put them in there and more often than not, it’s like, “I never would have imagined that’s what it would look like.” It’s a quick and easy sell. The products don’t cost any more, but you’ve actually elevated that space for them with the next 15 years with just a simple ability to get them on board with what you’re thinking in real time. 

What is the cost investment in AR/VR technologies for industry? 

Page: A lot of the software is really pretty inexpensive when you relate it to a lot of other things on the market. If you want good hardware, you’re going to pay a little more for that. Our laptop that we use is probably a $5,000 machine. For our return on investment, that’s good. It’s a 4-year-old machine, it’s got one purpose. … The upfront cost can kind of turn people off a little bit, but trying to make them understand your ROI is definitely going to be there with change orders. When somebody didn’t realize that’s what the carpet was going to look like … we get wrapped up in litigation. You’re going to pay for it tenfold just in the first hour when you sit down in a group to talk about what you did wrong. 

Freund: With the Matterport software that we use in the camera, there’s the upfront cost of the camera, and then there’s a subscription based on the number of tours that you want to have access to, or create and save. With R&R’s large portfolio, I think it makes sense for the landlord to make that investment. It’s just another tool in our marketing tool kit to help us lease space. For larger landlords, the cost scales down because of the many properties that we can and can’t utilize. For smaller landlords, that cost is going to be higher … it doesn’t always make sense. In the long run, as technology gets better and AR/VR gets better, people are going to more widely use it. Hopefully that cost comes down, and we’ll see it widely used in commercial real estate for leasing. 

Tow: Like all things computing-wise, the cost comes down over time. My son who’s a freshman at Iowa State University has a gaming laptop that will run a VR headset. This is attainable -- we’re doing professional work with things that are consumer tools. It’s not the professional market that’s driving this forward, it’s video games. … The delivery side is driven by consumer hardware. This stuff is being generated to be sold to average people for entertainment. 

One of the big things that happens in VR is that it’s one thing to stand in a space, it’s another thing to be able to walk through a space. For us to be able to have a space that’s 20 by 20 feet, that you can walk through a room scale, that changes things a lot. That was probably one of the best things we’ve done, is putting time and money into a fixed space so we can always do this. 

Page: We use an Oculus Quest headset, which is a wireless headset. … We can actually put that wireless headset on somebody and bring up a space. From a reality perspective, we can actually have them walk through that space. … They can still feel things that are physical barriers in that space, but then have that overlay of what the space looks like when it’s done. Those headsets are $500. … The hardware itself is inexpensive, and it really exemplifies what we can do to show clients space. 

What are the current limitations of AR/VR technology? 

Page: From a design perspective, speed. We’re still limited in some ways about how big of a model we can have inside of a virtual reality environment, and have it functional and work. 

We’ll actually mail headsets out to clients and be able to have them join into those with us. …. It’s more about getting more realistic, with less time. Final renders will take multiple days to render out or video processing, I think to get to a point from a gaming perspective, where you can do a walkthrough in your virtual reality, and then come out on the other end and it’s already post-processed. Give it a polish job and then say, “OK, we can send it off to the client.” That’s where things need to get to. I think they’re kind of constantly getting there, but it’s just going to be time and getting the software to catch up. 

Tow: We all keep hearing about the 5G networking from all the cellphone ads, but one of the use cases that impacts VR/HR is when we can get to the point where we don’t have to lug a computer around. When all the computing is happening in a data center somewhere, then you’re streaming out the pixels to the headset -- which is a nerdy way of saying I can take this headset and get the full power of a giant computer. Then Sean’s either going to ship a headset to somebody or they’re going to have a headset and you’re just renting time on a server somewhere to be able to use that. Once that happens, that’s going to open it up to the point where you’re not tethered to a cord, you’re not tethered to an office or computer or anything. 

We saw a demo a year and a half ago where we’re walking through a space wirelessly, and we’re walking 150 feet away from the computer. You’re moving through the space and able to understand it. That’s a scale of understanding that you can’t really get into. Real-time ray tracing [a digital rendering method noted for realism in video gaming] is a big deal. That’s not in VR yet, but when that gets to VR, that’s going to be a game changer as well.

Freund: When it comes to commercial leasing, I feel like we’ve been a little bit behind in VR. The tools that we need are probably already there. It’s just the cost compared to the number of tenants that you’re working with and the size of the tenants -- does that make sense for us to use at this point? 

I don’t want to make it about whether this landlord has this tech and that one doesn’t. It’s really more about, “Does this location suit my needs, is the landlord able to create a space that’s going to meet my needs and my budget long-term?” AR/VR really helps in making the decisions and seeing the end product. But I don’t want to say that you should count out a landlord that doesn’t use that technology.