DESIGNS COME TO (VIRTUAL) LIFE,
Offers walk-throughs, views of surroundings
An app created by a former Northeastern University professor uses augmented reality to allow architects and their clients to visualize a proposed building in the context of its surroundings.
Architects upload their design to Building Conversation’s cloud server, then go to the site of their proposed building and hold up their iPad, which, using the company’s Arc app, transposes the design onto the location.
“This allows both architects and their clients not only to see exactly what the building would look like in its actual surroundings, but also to walk through the building and look out windows to see the view,” said Terrence Masson, Building Conversation’s founder and CEO.
By doing that, Masson said, they can see that if one window were six inches higher, for example, they would be able to see a lighthouse in the distance.
“It’s too abstract to look at a blueprint or even a 3-D design with no real context,” he said. “Using Arc, clients are happier because they have to take a lot less on faith.”
Thomas McNeill, an associate at Hutker Architects in Falmouth, used the app to show his client, Lorilee Darling, what the Westerly, R.I., home he was designing for her would look like.
“This is great!” Darling said. “I’ve spent several hours standing on site, trying to visualize how my house is going to look and trying to imagine what we could see out of each window. An app like this makes things much simpler and allows me to experience my home during design, before we break the ground.”
Arc also makes projects cheaper and faster because architects have to spend less time making changes, Masson said.
The app is priced as a flexible monthly subscription or as a custom per-project fee and can be used not only for architecture, but for real estate and construction as well, he said.
If Boston had not withdrawn its bid to host the 2024 Olympics, for example, Arc could have been used to show what a stadium and an Olympic Village would have looked like amid their surroundings, Masson said.
Building Conversation has finished testing the app and now has more than 20 clients and is a finalist in the Mass-Challenge startup accelerator.
Masson and his team, which includes George Thrush, director of Northeastern’s School of Architecture, expect to get their first round of seed money in the fall to speed up the company’s development, refine its business model and round out its full-time team.