Over recent years there has been a steady rise in the use of high-end visualisation and virtual reality for communicating design proposals. I predict that this will become even more apparent and mainstream over the coming year with many more design practices adopting virtual reality to help explain their designs to clients.
Having been in the industry for over 20 years, the way in which designers visually communicate their ideas has evolved greatly. As a company and wider design community, our skills have progressed from the early days of hand sketch visuals to include photo realistic visualisation and, more recently, the use of headsets to explore a more advanced virtual world. Things have improved greatly from the rather clunky walk-throughs from previous years.
A virtual experience now offers the client an almost life-like view of the space they will be occupying. Allowing them to wander around their new space before it is physically built. This gives the client and designer the opportunity to adapt the design and space, ensuring that the end result is exactly to their liking. At Paramount we have already explored the use of VR on a number of schemes and during our recent Design Assembly event, ‘Cadspec’ exhibited their latest VR technology for all to try.
At the beginning of 2017, the trends and influences in workplace design that I talked about were retro, industrial and ornate, with overlaps in hotel, hospitality, architecture and office environments. Now at the beginning of 2018, before we tire of them and they morph into something else, these factors have indeed spread to become even more, dare I say, ostentatious.