Experience Raptor in Virtual Reality, at Home, Right Now

When Yachting Partners International hired Bricks & Goggles to create a virtual-reality experience for its 344-foot (105-meter) Raptor concept yacht, the Bricks & Goggles team also generated a smartphone app that lets users see a version at home.

The app is free. Just search for Bricks & Goggles in the app store, and then scroll down to the app called “Superyacht VR.” It will work as long as you have a smartphone with the processing power of an iPhone 6 or higher.

Next, go to your favorite search engine and type “Google Cardboard.” You’ll see what is essentially a foldable cardboard box with lenses that turn your smartphone into a virtual-reality headset. Google sells Cardboard for $15.

Once you receive the Cardboard in the mail, load up your smartphone app, put your phone into the Cardboard and watch. In your living room, you’ll see a scaled-back version of what yacht owners are being shown in the Oculus Rift system at Yachting Partners International.

I tried this with an iPhone 6s. I could definitely tell that I was looking at renderings as opposed to real life, and the app with Google Cardboard is a guided tour instead of a system that I could control, like the real version with Oculus Rift headsets. But the app was still pretty cool—like being inside a theme-park ride with IMAX screens all around. When the app took me outside the yacht, as if I were lifting off from a helicopter and looking back toward the boat at anchor, I could feel the motion in my stomach. (That’s usually how I feel in real life, too.) When I was inside the yacht, I felt fine, and I said out loud to nobody, “Wow.” —

The YPI Group system came to be because sales broker Russell Crump has a 14-year-old son who took him to play a video game while wearing Oculus Rift goggles at a shopping mall in Nice, France. Soon after, Crump saw a Bricks & Goggles demonstration at the Monaco Yacht Show. The two teams now have the photorealism down and are perfecting the speed at which image frames beam into people’s eyes, so viewers don’t experience vertigo. Today’s virtual-reality systems also offer benefits that could save yacht owners hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in the shipyard.

Dominator, Vripack and YPI Group all say that because photorealistic 3-D CAD drawings are the basis for what viewers see, the virtual-reality systems can be used by anyone—designers, naval architects, even yacht chefs who want to experience the way galley cabinets will be positioned before that part of a yacht goes into build.

“The spaces are what they really are,” Duncan says. “When it comes to mechanics and engineering, we’re thinking it can be very useful for those guys in laying out the systems, what size components they need, the storage space, whether people can reach things or get to things. A lot of things that have long been mathematics, you’ll actually be able to feel it.”

Imagine a yacht engineer being able to see whether he can reach a fuel filter before the shipyard starts construction.

“Every pump manufacturer and watermaker manufacturer has three-dimensional drawings that they’re putting into CAD designs when they’re designing the yacht,” Crump says. “We can put that in and see if they like it. Seven times out of 10, the engineer wants to change something, and the owner gets hit with a change order for a minimum $300,000. Now you can change it before it’s even built, and it costs you nothing.”

Dominator is already using the technology in this way. As Pernsteiner says, “Our design team or the engineers step into the virtual reality quite often to see the changes they are making or verify spaces in real time.”

Vripack’s Bouwhuis cites engine-room design as perhaps the most important, untapped resource for yacht owners within existing virtual-reality systems.

“This potentially is even way more substantial than the design validation,” Bouwhuis says. “Yacht systems and yacht engine rooms are getting so complex that to make sure the captain understands what he’s going to get, and the yacht engineer understands what he’s going to get, and the amount of value from a requested modification—there, you could for sure apply the same tool.”

He adds, “Imagine all the improvements you can make that will

save maintenance costs. Now you’ll understand if you can reach something or turn a valve.” Nobody is sure where virtual reality is going next, a truth as exhilarating as it is mind-boggling. As YPI Group learned when it wanted enhanced technology, more computer processing power was needed. The company couldn’t use any old laptop. It had to build a special box.

The movie industry has already made the next leap beyond that box. Cloud computing allows the processing capability of thousands of computers at once, which is how the geeks of Hollywood are turning out eye-popping films like 2015’s “The Walk.” Having the equivalent of 15,000 simultaneous cloud processors let the specialeffects geniuses do 9.1 million hours’ worth of image rendering in just a couple of months’ time—and then feed those shockingly realistic, IMAX-ready film images into yet another program that turned them into a 3-D video game. So today, wearing goggles like the Oculus Rift headset that is being used in yachting applications, video-gamers can step right into scenes from the movie, which look more photo-realistic than ever.

Ingmar Vroege, co-founder at Bricks & Goggles, says there’s no reason the yachting world can’t move into that level of virtual reality next.

“We’re like game designers, only we do it for a functional project like yachts or houses,” he says. “We basically build a game, and we try to make the game as realistic as possible. You can see us as game designers with the plans from a shipyard.”

Vroege already has received a request from one yacht owner for a realistic version not only of his yacht, but also of his private jet.

“They asked if they can make a jet room, so I can jet there with my friends in virtual reality, all together from different homes, and then we can all hang out together on the yacht in virtual reality,” Vroege says. “That is already possible. It won’t take long. Maybe two or three years. Maybe sooner.”

He sees the future of virtual reality in yachting about to collide with the technology from games like “World of Warcraft,” in which teams can play together in real time onscreen while actually inside their homes elsewhere.

“They’re not putting on a virtual-reality headset yet,” Vroege says. “They’re sitting at their computers. But the headset, that’s the next step.”

Imagine a yacht designer calling your home in Chicago from his office in London. You both put on virtual-reality headsets. The application launches, and you’re inside your yacht concept with the designer, off the coast of Portofino, Italy, deciding how to perfect the view of the harbor from what will someday be the foldout balcony in your master stateroom.

“We’re aiming to do that in 2017,” Vroege says. “We really think it’s possible. I know what we’ve done in a year, and I think this is doable in a year and a half. We already have the infrastructure there. It’s just making sure that everyone has an Oculus Rift.”