Over the last five years, the VR market has witnessed remarkable growth, with over 51 million headsets sold globally, generating a staggering $9 billion in 2023. 

While gaming has been a dominant force in the VR realm, the technology is making significant strides in fields such as engineering, healthcare, education, and more. In this article, we explore the profound impact of VR on the world of engineering, delving into real-world applications and insights from industry experts.

The Rise of VR in Engineering

VR is already being utilised in engineering to allow people to meet and review plans in a 3d rendered environment rather than looking over BIM plans. While this isn’t yet mainstream and the technology has further to come, we are at the start of a VR revolution in engineering.

In June of the current year, Apple unveiled its latest product, the Vision Pro, marking the tech giant’s foray into virtual reality. However unlike previous VR hardware that has been sold, it comes with a hefty price tag of £3,500 which suggests it is not aimed at casual gamers. 

“With the Apple vision Pro, the price point is high, but also the quality is extremely high. They’re saying like, what is a super premium version of a VR headset? It will be interesting to see what the market says about this. It is expensive by one metric, but maybe not by another metric when you’re looking at the high end workstations that we buy, $3,500 is on par with a high end.” Gabe Paez says.

Gabe Paez is the head of product for XR at Autodesk, XR is Extended Reality. Paez describes XR as being part of a virtual reality spectrum, but the key element of XR is its connection to the physical world. “It’s saying that we are creating a platform, which is capable of either being connected or disconnected from the physical room that you’re inside of based on what you want, not what we’re not like choosing a specific hardware.”

Making VR more accessible has been part of Paez’s work before joining Autodesk. He previously founded the VR platform The Wild which allowed people to join a VR rendering of project plans either by using a VR headset or through their computer. 

However with people joining from different machines with different capabilities, rendering an entire model is not always a smooth process.

Cloud Delivery

Rendering complex models is not easy for any computer, and as VR gets more complicated, processing that data and rendering with good graphics has become a limiting factor for the technology.

“It’s absolutely been a limiting factor, not just in VR, I mean, I would argue this is the limiting factor on every platform in the web, this has been a challenge on desktop, this has been a challenge.” Paez says. “Now it’s almost exponentially harder in VR, because we have to render the environment at least 72 frames per second, compared to a browser where you can sort of selectively render frames. So the necessity for real time is much higher.”

To overcome the rendering difficulties, the XR team at Autodesk wanted to develop their software to utilise cloud delivery.

Paez says, “That’s how we’re able to make this happen through better usage of cloud storage, and cloud delivery and streaming. But in a way, the benefit of that is that you can access it on anything from a mobile standalone VR headset to a mobile phone to a browser on a lower power device, like desk, you know, a giant workstation and have a similar experience on all of those”

AI’s Role in Shaping the Future of XR

Paez believes that XR and AI are going to grow together as sibling technologies. While chat bots dominate the AI landscape at the moment VR and XR are a far more suitable medium to interface with AI.

Paez wants to develop XR which seamlessly integrates with AI, allowing users to control visual and computing experiences through voice commands. “There is no better interface for AI than XR. Hands down. It is the most human-friendly way to experience digital content in XR and AI is going to be the backbone of how we experience XR in the future, both via user experience and via technology that powers it. So this to me is a big thing that I people should not miss, which is how not only XR is dependent on AI to really realise its full potential.

The Future of XR

Some form of extended or virtual reality is already being used on projects across the engineering sector, but as the technology continues to develop further, the more it will be utilised in industry.

Working in XR can provide significant benefits when it comes to collaborating with various stakeholders, particularly those without extensive experience in working with building plans.

Paez explains, “It is definitely preferable to be inside of the building in the final phase of it, once it’s actually built, you have an understanding of that space through the experience of the space that you just don’t have when you’re looking at plans.I mean, this is obvious for like clients; the clients of our clients were generally not adept in reading plans. So it really helps them to understand a space by being inside of it. But I would argue even for people who absolutely have been looking at plans their entire career, and they understand what, like, what five feet on a plan feels like in real life. Even for them, there’s a familiarity that comes from being inside of that space and just moving around it and living inside of it.”

This is not the only benefit working in XR can bring and for Paez it isn’t even the greatest benefit. Working in a fast rendering, seamless computer experience has the potential to save projects time.

Paez explains, “If viewing a position or a view of a model takes, well, definitely, if you’re rendering it for minutes or hours, that’s just the waiting time that’s like you sitting at your workstation waiting to see what you want to see. And we should hold ourselves to a standard of being able to view and review in real time and not waiting whether even when you switch a view whether it’s you know, seconds, you’re waiting for five seconds that adds up over the course of like working through a giant project, we want to make that milliseconds versus like five seconds that you’re waiting repeatedly over the course of the day as you’re exploring a model. So the value of just making everything faster and more real time is quite simply that you’re not waiting.”

Small time savings that occur frequently add up overtime to make a quite significant saving, but working in XR with more collaborative and intuitive working in the design and approval phase can provide much larger time and money savings by catching errors early in the process and correcting them. 

VR may be dominated by gaming in the present but experiencing the digital world in a more seamless integrated way with the real world might just be the future of all computing at home and at work.

“Of course, there’s value in gaming, people have seen that in VR for a long time. But that’s the low hanging fruit here. In the business use cases, we’ve definitely seen a tremendous amount of value for the building industry.  Putting you in a headset inside of that model is a problem that it’s just very difficult, if not impossible to solve in any other way. Because you can’t prototype a whole building. What we can do in XR is just foundationally, faster, more efficient, lower cost, easier to ideate, and so on.” says Paez.