The ability to view & navigate a project in VR - Oculus / HTC Vive HMD's

[Anonymous]

There is the need to immerse someone into the scan and VR would be an excellent option.  When scans come into our office the rest of the project team needs to get up to speed. Combining the use of VR would enable any team member to " walk " around the newly scanned space. The ability to review the scan in VR seems like a logical progression in the Recap roadmap as we have seen significant increases in productivity utilizing HMD's.

[LyleHardin]

I second this. Especially if we could add the .nwd file to the Virtual tour. Right now we are doing this manually with Unity. But it's quite the process, having to parse down the point cloud so it's usable, export our 3D models to .fbx files, bring all that into Unity and port over to Oculus Rift. It'd be great to have a button "Export to Rift" or similar....

This would be most useful, actually, from Navisworks.

[dgorsman]

As of now VR capabilities require significant simplification of data for practical use.  Direct use of "heavy data" like point clouds and other engineering work may have to wait for a couple of generations of hardware advancement for smooth use.  I think the HMD market needs a couple of years to shake out a standard too, ala BETAMAX vs. VHS or HD-DVD vs. BluRay.  Its easier to implement when there aren't so many moving targets.

And the usual comment about how "any team member" excludes those with glasses. 

[Anonymous]

I already use 3rd party software to navigate point clouds ( Worldviz   / Vizard ) with great success. I don't think the timeline is as far off as you think it is.

The fact that I have to create a stack to do it is the suggestion for Autodesk. 

[dgorsman]

@Anonymous  - "create a stack to do it" means... what?

I had a quick peek at the Worldviz site - looks like point cloud data still to be pre-processed first.  Is this correct?

[Anonymous]

Yes - It only handles a .PTS file but there is freeware that converts E57's to the PTS

It's a stack to get it into worldviz, Recap to E57, Cloud compare to PTS, and then into wordviz, but the ability is there.