AR Landscape Design

There are quite a few examples for companies that frequently need landscape design in their workflow. Most notably game studios. Augmented Reality could provide solutions for these companies that would simplify and speed up the workflow like, for example, advanced “sandboxes” for terrain forming.

Benefits

When you are creating terrain in 3D software on a computer, the abstraction can lead to an unrealistic look and feel of the results. However, when physically designing terrain you might have trouble getting the results into a digital medium that might be required for the upcoming work. Augmented Reality can build the bridge. It could digitize the formed terrain live and then allow you to further manipulate and fine-tune it in software. Or it could allow you to virtually place trees on a physical hill in front of you, record their positions and create digital data from that.

Challenges

What’s challenging here is the hardware. Modern games are becoming so advanced that you need severe processing power to render the items. AR goggles might not be able to provide that computing power yet. But on the other hand, when just placing trees you probably won’t need it. Intricate texturing and sculpting can be done afterwards, the terrain can be designed with less graphic intense placeholders.

What to Take Away

There are certain industries where landscape design can greatly benefit from a physical-digital hybrid approach like one AR could provide. It gives you access to the best of both worlds.

Examples

iScape