Thursday, September 26, 2019

Virtual Reality at Vision Northland Groundbreaking

Yesterday I had the opportunity to deliver virtual reality at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new hospital project LHB is involved in with lead design firm EwingCole. The $800 million dollar project is for Essentia Health, called Vision Northland, and replaces the hospital where I was born!


Read on to learn more...
The image above is of EwingCole Principal Oscar F. Gomes checking out the VR experience before the ceremony began. The next images show the VR equipment all set up and ready to go for the event.



The ceremonial shovels and hardhats were ready as well...


Two types of VR were offered to anyone who attended the event.

We had panorama-type images in the Oculus Go... which offered several 360-degree single-point-of-view renderings around the exterior of the building.


And fully immersive real-time VR in the HTC Vive... which offered the ability to move around within the 3D model using a handheld controller.


Essentia Health's Sr. Project Manager – Practice Transformation, Sheila Hawk, for the Vision Northland project is exploring the fresh images created earlier that day for the Oculus Go. Behind Sheila is EwingCole President Robert A. McConnell, AIA (left) and LHB Chairman of the Board Bill Bennett (right).


Here I am, drawing folks in by jumping in to VR and using it, so people can see the action on the large display behind me. Notice the cameraman... you can also see me again via the media links below:)


The ceremony began with several short speeches by individuals who played a vital role in making this project a reality. This included Essentia Health's Chief Executive Officer Dr. David Herman.


And our Mayor, Emily Larson... also took the stage and spoke about the value of this project for our community and the strong positive engagement the City of Duluth has provided for this project.


Here are a few images of the model used for the virtual reality experience. For those involved in VR for AEC, you may be interested to know I used Enscape version 2.6. With this software, I created the photosphere images for the Oculus Go and served up the real-time VR experience powered by an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000.


Media Coverage

The local media covered the event. The ABC link below includes a 7 minute video I created as well.

Here are a few images from the model used for VR at the groundbreaking ceremony (click to enlarge).




BTW, EwingCole has been great to work with... very talented and professional staff. Plus, a cool side note, they also designed the largest net-zero commercial building in the US; read more about that here: Biotech firm’s new building is net-zero.

Finally, the landscape architecture is being designed by the Minneapolis-based Damon Farber.

Related links:
Click website for project: Essentia Health - Vision Northland



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Check out my video-based  courses on ArchSmarter.

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