VIRTUAL BON CARRÉ EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
- Let's walk the Blueprints, NOW!
When Windward Properties, LLC, needed to take people through their latest project, Bon Carré, a 500,000 square foot mixed-use entertainment center in Baton Rouge, they faced a problem common to the world of developers and architects. How do you show prospective tenants something that doesn't exist yet?
More than that, how do you convince a department store chain, a restaurateur, a banker, a retailer or a skeptical city council what the impact of the development is truly going to be?
Models help but unless you are a quarter of an inch tall, you can't walk around inside of a model and you can't do surgery on it every few minutes. Clearly this was a job for Metavision's Immersive Media Center.
Now all of that has changed. These frames from the Bon Carré virtual walk though are a tiny fraction of the definition of the original display. The original image is 3200 x 1024 pixels in size for each frame and is generated live onto the screen at 30 frames per second by a super computer. Completely interactive, you can travel to any place in the model in the blink of an eye or stroll through interiors to see how the finished project will feel.
When potential retailers saw what the finished center was going to be like, they had no trouble signing up for store space here, restaurant space there. In fact, the entire center was rented out in just two days. All because the store owners weren't looking at blueprints and artist's conceptions, they had gone to the site and walked the promenades, collonades, alleys and sidewalks for themselves.
The experience of creating this virtual model proved its usefulness from the very beginning. Architect Brent Thompson of the Cuningham Group, AIA, was able to stand in the rough model and make critical decisions about building placement, walkways, landscaping and a host of features usually delegated to the "if we had it to do all over again" category. Refinement of the human scale and personal appeal of the project's many details were enhanced at (literally) every turn.
The model is displayed on the GVR-120 display system made by our sister company, Panoram Technologies. Originally developed by Metavision in the 1980's this seamless, widescreen, wrap around image fills the viewer's visual field right out to the edges of vision allowing a modest group of up to 20 people to partake in the same virtual reality experience.