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Friday, July 19, 2019

Virtual Project Tours of Real Projects

I have been wanting to use our 360 Photosphere camera to create a virtual tour of a project. We finally did just that last week for a project in construction; Hermantown Essentia YMCA Wellness Center. The  local Chamber of Commerce held an open house last night and attendees got to get in the project and safely view it without actually going to the site. We already did Virtual Reality, and now that the project is under construction, we wanted to present something new.

Another interesting thing about this project is how we used ElumTools to do specialized daylighting calculations to comply with Minnesota's B3 program (similar to LEED). The image below shows the favorable results; solatubes fully lighting the interior space with just daylight!


Continue reading to learn more...

For an example of how a photosphere video can be viewed, click here. Once the video starts, just click and drag your cursor around to the screen to look in any direction.


When using a phone, you can just move the phone around to look. Or, drop the phone into a Google Cardview viewer for a more immersive experience. Finally, this also works in full-blown VR systems as they too support YouTube content!

Photosphere videos:
First Floor Tour
Second Floor Tour

Photosphere stills:
http://www.lhbcorp.com/vr-files/_essentia-health-regional-wellness-construction/tour.html

Here are the two 360 photosphere videos linked above.



For more on the Solatubes, check out this previous post I wrote: Daylight Factor with Solar Tubes in ElumTools. Note that, in addition to daylight, we also used solatube photometry (IES files) from the manufacture to develop compliance. At the time, Elumtools could not use photometry data for DT calcs, so they provided a modified version of the software to LHB.

You might also be interesting in this blog post I wrote fro Enscape on how to use this same camera to create a custom skybox: Custom Skybox in Enscape.



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I also write blog posts for Enscape - a new paradigm in rendering, animation and VR for AEC.