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With Icube technology, restaurant design will soon require 3-D glasses and joysticks
Chefs have been pushing the culinary envelope for years, and now a local firm is serving up a futuristic spin on restaurant design.
Chipman Design Architecture, which has been behind major restaurant projects including Chick-Fil-A, Buffalo Wild Wings, Epic Burger and RPM Italian, is partnering with Irvine, Calif.-based EON Reality to make designing a virtual experience.
Rolling out early next month, the technology known as Icube takes computer-generated 3-D models to a whole new level, projecting them virtually in the “cave” — an 8-by-8-foot room in Chipman’s Des Plaines design center — so clients can get a spatial sense of their restaurant before it’s built.
Clients then don 3-D glasses equipped with motion sensors and use a joystick to navigate the virtual restaurant — which even can be outfitted with avatar diners. Whatever the restaurant size, clients can virtually maneuver through the different rooms, checking door widths, looking under tables or getting a sense of overall flow. Icube also enables the designers to easily switch out colors, finishes and lighting for clients.
“They can literally get a sense of the space without having to do any of those physical mockups,” says George Matos, chief technology officer and principal at Chipman. “And we can change things out on the fly so that they can get a real-time assessment of what they want to see.”
But the virtual equipment has a real price tag — around $235,000 for Chipman (which includes software, hardware and installation). But restaurateurs — at least those who can spend upward of $150,000 building full-size models in warehouses — could see a major cost reduction. A virtual design will run between $20,000 and $40,000.
Large-scale models, used primarily by corporate restaurant chains, can take weeks or even months to build, and often only include portions of the restaurant design. The back-and-forth between designers and members of the restaurant team can be tricky to schedule, Chipman CEO John Chipman says.
“[Clients] can spend two or three days with us, and in that time we’re going to get more achieved than I think you could get done in several months in the old way you do it,” he says.
EON has done some work directly with restaurants — like Taco Bell, also based in Irvine — but Chipman is the first design firm to acquire the Icube technology.
“It’s a little risky, a little scary, but it’s going to be so cool,” Chipman says. “It’s going to change the process of design, I’m convinced.”