Faster, More Immersive, and Ready for Professional Workflows

*Update* as of March 2019: IrisVR free trials are now 14 days long.

We're excited to announce that both Prospect and Scope will include 45-day free trials, up from 21 days previously. This change comes after speaking to our customers and listening to feedback from the community - VR is frontier technology, and 21 days isn't quite enough time to guarantee the hardware is working properly and successfully use IrisVR's software. We hope that this change will give you an opportunity to properly set up your own VR workstation, view your 3D models in VR, present that work to your clients, and test out the pro features that we offer, all while evaluating the product for free. The changes are as follows:

Update: the issue has since been resolved since late 2016. If you're curious to learn more about our history and how we think about our software, keep reading! 

We're excited to host a series of events during Archtober, New York City's Architecture and Design Month, featuring the Freshkills Park Development Team/NYC Parks, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, NY Rising, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Ennead Architects, with our media sponsors The Architect's Newspaper.  Please join us!  Attendees will have the opportunity to try out the latest virtual reality technology and experience unbuilt projects using Prospect and Scope.

V-Ray has posted a tutorial video here: https://youtu.be/elqX1yruAnI

You can render stereoscopic panoramas using a variety of applications such as V-Ray or Lumion, and share these with clients or colleagues using the IrisVR Scope app. Check out a full list of supported panorama formats here.

Where to find your Mac GPU:

After our previous post that broke down the process of setting up and deploying to Samsung’s GearVR, we took on the challenge of converting one of our in-house DK2 demos to work with it. It wasn’t simply a matter of plug-and-play with the Unity game engine; in fact, we had to completely re-think the way in which we’ve optimized 3D geometry in the past due to the differences between the PC and mobile platforms, such as the importance of draw calls. We also had to pay close attention to polycount because of the relatively low limit on mobile hardware. Last but not least, one of the key factors of a good VR demo is an intuitive input method, so we experimented with the Gear’s touchpad until we found a solid solution. The model we worked with was a simple solar-powered house design that was originally modeled in Revit and then brought into 3DS Max.

If you're working on SketchUp files that will be shown in VR, it can be helpful to keep an eye on polygon count. Here's a quick post on how to find it.

At Iris, we are always excited to try out new toys and share what we discover. With the release of Samsung’s GearVR at the height of the holiday season, Jack and Amr couldn’t think of a better time to dive into mobile VR.