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Thursday, September 13, 2018

Minnesota State Senator Experiences Virtual Reality at LHB

Yesterday I had the opportunity to facilitate a Virtual Reality (VR) experience of an LHB project for few people visiting LHB, including Minnesota State Senator Erik Simonson.

CEEM (Clean Energy Economy Minnesota), a non-profit whose mission is to educate and stimulate economic growth in clean energy industries, brought together the Senator, LHB, Minnesota Power, Ecolibrium3, and CEE (Center for Energy and Environment) to learn about the CIP program. The CIP (Conservation Improvement Program) is intended to help organizations and households achieve energy efficiency. Minnesota Power provided rebates through their CIP program to support the LHB-designed DTA Duluth Transportation Center, which the group toured after the meeting.

I had a few minutes to demonstrate what LHB is doing with VR. In the next two photos I am showing the Senator the Essentia Health Wellness Center in VR, which is currently under construction in Hermantown.



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In our Duluth office, we have this large room-scale VR area with a 22' diagonal free area which can be used by the person wearing the wireless VR gear to explore a project. When properly positioned within a work room or behind a reception desk we can get a realistic feel for the number of steps required to move around and perform certain functions.



In addition to VR, everyone was also able to see this project in a Google Cardboard walk-through using our LHB Viewer and this link http://www.lhbcorp.com/vr/#essentia-wellness-center. We have many examples that can be viewed on a computer, phone, or in Cardboard.

The short video below is of the television screen with Enscape in VR mode. It is amazing to see the water quality produced in VR by that software.


LHB has been a leader in implementing Virtual Reality in our industry. Using this technology empowers our clients and stakeholders by allowing them to virtually walk through, and around, a building at 1:1 scale with realistic lighting, materials and in this project, water.

Dell even created a marketing video showing how one of their customers, LHB, is using their hardware to facilitate VR in the AEC market. Click the video below to see the YouTube video.


One of the participants came up to me after the VR demo and said it looks like you "really like your job." I agreed! We do a lot of exciting work at LHB... thanks for reading.

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