Morpholio Releases AR SketchWalk Feature for Trace
Ever wanted to immerse yourself into a sketch or drawing? If you are an artist, draftsman or designer, you might feel the urge to walk inside your sketches and explore the complex shapes and images that you have created, a prospect that is impossible with the conventional two-dimensional sketches.
Morpholio, a group of apps for the creative niche, has just launched an AR app called SketchWalk that allows designers to walk inside the images they have created in an experience that mirrors a surreal walk into real-world blueprints.
Traditionally, draftsmen, architects, engineers or builders will tape off rooms on a floor for the client can walk through and visualize the finished product. This is a manual and exhausting task that involves pounding stakes into the ground and tying a rope between them to bring out the visual impact that the client can look at and imagine how the room is likely to look like when complete. With the release of Apple’s iOS 12 and Shared AR, it is now possible to elevate the task of design, collaboration and the application of augmented reality to add some realism to the sketch or design work.
This is what Morpholio is tapping into. By combining the iOS 12ARKit with Trace, it is now possible to teleport into a sketch via iPad and then use augmented reality to “walk around” a scaled plan for maximum visual impact. It is even possible to bring other viewers with you and share the experience.
Traditional draftsmanship involves pacing out plans and the attributes such as scale, dimension as well as the extent of the drawing are not easily brought out using stills or animations. With the augmented reality experience, users can experience the realism in the drawing and get the palpable sense of how the space being sketched will feel when completed. This also helps in quick decision-making as the client is able to promptly evaluate the design and decide what will work for them.
With the shared experience, the client can do lots of shared tasks such as taking their family through the new design in augmented reality. If you are a designer, you can use the AR app to take your team through the space that you have designed or simply take a stroll through the spaces to get a feel of the design and other ideas that might improve the project.
Design is more than just having a brilliant idea. A big part of the project is also trying to convince and get buy-in from prospective clients or senior executives. The AR SketchWalk app simplifies the convincing part as the designer can simply rope in a client around an iPad Pro to sketch or gain an experience of the design in augmented reality. This is quite illuminating for the client and they are able to gain a very realistic impression of the designer’s ideas. Gathering together and even immersing yourselves in the drawings also leads to a far more engaging design conversation between the designer and client and greater productivity in the process.
With the iPad Pro Gen 3, the designer can also fully explore their design capabilities with a faster and more integrated Pencil. Performance-wise, it’s more powerful than most laptops currently used in design work. Morpholio has integrated the new Pencil Tap functionality into its Trace feature thereby enabling designers to simply tap on the pencil to flip the design tools like the rulers from horizontal to vertical orientation or simply scroll down through the stencil options available in the interface.
The new Pencil Tap functionality in Trace makes drawing and creating a lot more intuitive and natural through a powerful synergy of software and hardware tools. It’s designed to optimally tap into your talent to its fullest capabilities. Whatever your creative ideas, the tools will not be a limiting a factor.
The designer can place themselves wherever they want inside the drawing with just a single tap. The immersive functionality is highly flexible and the user can begin with any sketch, background or floor plan and fix the scale whereupon the lines drawn in Trace can be extended and controlled in layers.
Once the surface has been registered, a functionality that Morpholio has borrowed from other augmented reality apps, the user will have their plan superimposed on the ground to scale creating a virtual room that they can walk into alone or with others. With the 3D slider, the user can extrude selected lines to create surfaces which they can walk between.
Trace’s SketchWalk allows the designer to have a host of experiences ranging from the scaled up life-sized building to the art on the wall. All this is delivered in high quality impressive augmented reality powered by Apple’s ARKit framework for augmented reality apps. SketchWalk delivers one of the most powerful platforms for experiencing scale in sketches or drawings via the ARKit support for shared sessions.
The Morpholio Trace feature is available for download on the App Store and can be used on both iPhones and iPads.
Morpholio was founded by four architects who were looking for smarter mobile tools that they could use in all phases of the design process. Their constellation of apps for creative processes are built for the designer and combine the speed and fluidity of drawing by hand with the precision and intelligence of modern device technology. Morpholio products are used by clients in more than 150 countries.
https://virtualrealitytimes.com/2019/03/13/morpholio-releases-ar-sketchwalk-feature-for-trace/ModelingSoftwareEver wanted to immerse yourself into a sketch or drawing? If you are an artist, draftsman or designer, you might feel the urge to walk inside your sketches and explore the complex shapes and images that you have created, a prospect that is impossible with the conventional two-dimensional sketches. Morpholio,...Sam OchanjiSam Ochanji[email protected]EditorVirtual Reality Times - Metaverse & VR