Delivering High-Quality Architectural Designs Through Real-Time VR

Lake|Flato conducts immersive reviews with their clients to evaluate architectural designs. The opportunity to review a building design in augmented reality (AR) or VR enables both designers and clients the opportunity to offer feedback before construction begins. This type of design review saves costs, as well as time.  

Lake|Flato has dedicated high-quality VR spaces in their physical office. The firm equips staff with Dell tablets that can remote into high-powered Dell desktops running on NVIDIA professional GPUs, such as the NVIDIA RTX™ 5000 Ada Generation.

But to drive real-time-rendered VR experiences in applications like Enscape, designers needed high-powered laptops, along with their tablets. 

While all of this provided a top-tier setup for in-person collaboration and review workflows, it didn't completely accommodate full VR experiences using Enscape outside the office. Because untethered VR use was only possible on the local area network (LAN), it was strictly reserved for in-office design reviews and client experiences.

Using Innoactive Portal, a server platform for remote hosting VR applications, and CloudXR, Lake|Flato was able to address this challenge and deliver high-quality, real-time-rendered VR experiences to their clients in the office and outside the office. Innoactive Portal gave Lake|Flato’s designers the ability to select previously uploaded VR experiences from a list, similar to YouTube videos. Then, as long as there was internet connectivity, they could run the selected experience anywhere.

VR experiences powered by CloudXR allow the designers at Lake|Flato to use wireless head-mounted displays (HMDs) without worrying about degradation in graphics. CloudXR also supports streaming AR content to AR devices—such as phones and tablets—which means users just need to bring a Meta Quest 2 and a standard-issue tablet to immerse themselves in full-fidelity virtual experiences.

The Dell tablets are connected to streaming VR in clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and latency is minimized by Innoactive’s method of connecting the VR software to the closest data center based on the user's location. 

Having the VR experience streamed from the cloud also meant that Lake|Flato didn't have to worry about upgrading their computer hardware. Innoactive gave designers the option to choose which NVIDIA GPUs would be deployed from the cloud for each experience, allowing the team to allocate higher-powered GPUs to larger, more complex projects.

“This platform, powered by NVIDIA CloudXR, has the potential to increase the use of high-quality VR in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry,” said Dan Stine, director of design technology at Lake|Flato. “It also removes the burden of the design firm needing to upgrade hardware, as this is done in the cloud. Our clients and designers are able to enjoy an immersive VR experience more often, given the ease of portability.”

Now, Lake|Flato designers and clients can take advantage of the power of RTX GPUs while streaming with CloudXR to any XR device.

The team at Lake|Flato is also enhancing their design workflows with NVIDIA RTX. The real-time rendering capabilities of the RTX 5000 enable designers to easily manage complex 3D models and scenes, even in immersive environments.

Stine and his team regularly visualize architectural files and create stereo panoramas using Chaos Enscape, a real-time visualization tool. With Enscape running on the RTX 5000, Lake|Flato can visualize their projects daily, develop design solutions, and create presentations for teams and clients.

The 32GB of graphics memory also allows Lake|Flato to open large projects in Enscape without needing to remove parts of the file or reduce the number of textures in scenes.

Thanks to the powerful performance of the RTX 5000, the designers at Lake|Flato can produce high-quality renders and provide clients with a more comfortable and contextual VR experience.