A fresh look at landscape designing with Augmented Reality
In the summer of 2021, I started exploring applications of Augmented Reality technology.
I have been imagining an app or apps utilizing immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), or Mixed Reality (XR)meaningfully to fulfill my goals:
- Make people more productive
- Improve process efficiencies in achieving their desired goals/outcomes, and
- Make people’s life a bit simpler than it is.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I picked up a few domains like Education, Retail, Home renovation to explore if there are problems to be solved.
In this article, I’ll write about a specific domain “Home Renovation”, which I got interested in and started dreaming about how to solve a problem I saw.
Backstory
Most recently I had renovated my backyard. Instead of a concrete patio, I got it finished with beautiful Quarystone pavers from Calstone, replacing some portion of the lawn.
The process of getting this small project done wasn’t simple. We had a faint idea of what we wanted to do with the backyard patio project, so we searched on Google/Pinterest for inspiration.
The process
Given it was a very small project, we didn’t actually hire a landscape designer. We took the area measurements, created a scaled-down blueprint of the proposed project, calculated approximate costs involved — labor, materials, haul away material costs, disposal costs (I even looked up the cost to recycle concrete slabs in my city), etc. to come with a project estimate — something that we would use to negotiate the final cost with the contractor. We wanted to make sure we’re making an informed decision (especially with respect to the cost) when finalizing a specific offer.
Next step: Find the contractor!
We looked up for contractors/PROs on Yelp, and contacted a few contractors, each one of them dropped by, took measurements, provided quotes in a couple of days through email/text. They also recommended visiting actual nearby stone yards to check on various stones on their displays. So we did. We visited the stone yard to check out the colors, textures, and patterns. In fact, we made two visits as we couldn’t make up our minds. There is no other way to see the actual pavers, their colors, and textures without seeing them in person. Also, we were advised that pavers look different when they are wet vs when they are dry or under bright light vs under a shade. Although time-consuming, we thought our stone yard visits were worthwhile.
We picked up two colors — Calstone’s Sunset Terracota for the paver circle and Rustic Yellowstone for the rest of the patio.
Till this point, we still had no way to “visualize” how the finished patio is going to look like.
Anyhow, once the contractor started the work, they dug up old lawn/sod, tore down the concrete patio, and hauled away the stuff. Then new beautiful pavers showed up. As the contractor put up those pavers one by one, our dream patio started to take shape. We were very happy with the outcome and thought it turned out how we imagined it.
Now, this is my favorite place in the world.
Why I’m telling this?
While we did this small project, I realized I’ve found a use case for applying AR technology and making this entire process very simple.
Imagine, taking out your smartphone or an iPad, walking around in the backyard, designing how you want to layout your pavers, and with a few taps, you have it there, in front of you, the rendering of the patio as you were dreaming. With few more taps, you can try different pavers, patterns and colors. What else you could do once the design is visualized?
With this use-case in mind, I spent a good part of Summer 2021 coding this prototype App — DreamzAR.
Here is an example of how this prototype app used Augmented Reality and pavers textures.
So far we looked at visualizing pavers or lawns but nothing about plants. The plants are a big part of landscape design, and depending upon where you live, you would want native plants in your garden.
Using 3D models of plants, I can place plants in my visualization. Here are some examples:
Bird’s eye view of the designed front yard
Here is another front yard design:
How does that look?
Some people told me they couldn’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s virtual. To me, AR is looking very promising to build very realistic immersive experiences around many use-cases including the ones I mentioned above.
In the coming weeks, I’ll write specifically about this prototype app and what it can do.
Overall, my prototype is looking very promising.
Using Apple’s Appstore Connect / Testflight, I made the Beta build of my app available for testing. I shared it with friends and family and continued iterating over it based on their feedback.
Initial feedback has been encouraging and I’ve been accommodating the feedback in newer builds.
I would love it if you could join the Beta program. I’m looking for feedback to improve the user experience. Drop me a note at akhilesh (at) immex.tech and I’ll send you an invite for the Beta program.
To test Beta build, you should have iPhone or iPad, with iOS 14.7 or higher
I truly appreciate you taking the time to read this far. I believe immersive technology will touch more aspects of our lives than we think. The future is going to be awesome, and I’m going to try contributing to it meaningfully.
Please don’t hesitate to leave your comments, thoughts, and questions. I would love to have a conversation with industry experts, trailblazers, trend observers, and futurists. I’m just getting started in this domain, and I want to learn as much as I can.
Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/akhileshjoshi or LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhileshjoshi/
