Virtual Reality might be used both to describe the future and to preserve the past, says Softroom’s Oliver Salway
Softroom was founded 25 years ago with the intention to explore both the real and the virtual worlds of architecture. But back then, the technology for virtual reality (VR) was still a rarefied world of computers the size of fridge-freezers and unconvincing graphics. Fast-forward to today, and the medium has evolved unbelievably in terms of realism. VR is also becoming affordable, accessible and available on the desktop of most designers, so it can now be part of a studio’s everyday workflow. We’ve found it applicable in multiple ways – as a design development tool, as a presentation and review format, and as a medium to be explored in its own right.
In our work for clients as diverse as the NHS and airlines, the ability to test design options for impact and ergonomics has been invaluable, whether that’s checking the accessibility of a reception desk at a GP’s surgery or the sight-lines to a cinema screen in an airport lounge. For client review and approvals, being able to immerse prospective corporate booking agents in a prototype hotel room, without needing to build a physical mock-up, unlocked an impossible time schedule.
Lounge for Turkish Airlines at Istanbul Airport, designed by Softroom
Likewise, the ability to freely explore an entire space won the approval of executives at a cruise ship operator, who were otherwise limited to trying to piece together the vast and complex set of spaces within a giant ship from isolated fragmentary ‘real-world’ mock-up pieces – a lift car in Genoa, a staircase in a shed in Stratford…
I believe that one of the most powerful ‘use-cases’ for virtual media is as a record of loss. Through 3D scanning we have the ability to record places that we may be about to lose to rising seas, for example, and then to share them immersively with a global audience and future generations via VR.
This power of resurrection might also be applied to designs that were never realised. In our own practice, we have been able to loop back and revive early conceptual designs made for a magazine nearly 25 years ago, which – though fully resolved in 3D – were only ever reproduced in print and which we’d never before experienced life-size and immersively. It was a bit like suddenly discovering a colour photograph of a great-grandparent you’d only ever seen before in black and white.
What interests me most is to explore the potential of virtual and augmented realities not just as glorified models but as artistic media in themselves”
And we’re recreating in VR the interior of an first-class Boeing 747 cabin that we designed in 2001, the last real examples of which have just been forced into retirement by Covid-19. The same 3D models that were used as the basis for prototyping and manufacture are completing their ‘afterlife-cycle’ by being brought into VR and coloured in with our memories of that perhaps defunct ‘golden age’ of luxury global travel.
Looking forward, what interests me most is to explore the potential of virtual and augmented realities not just as glorified models or the backdrops to video games, but as artistic media in themselves. They are inherently spatial media – and by rights that is the territory of the architect. Liberated from the constraints of budget and gravity, what might architects feel free to explore? Especially so when the opportunities for ‘wasteful’ expressive design in the real world become rightly reduced by the imperatives of the climate crisis.
