On the top floor of a beautifully renovated old mill building building in Cambridge, the mere mention of the term virtual reality conjures up images of devices more closely resembling Darth Vader’s helmet than a pair of ski goggles or sunglasses in the minds of most of the architects in the room. The skeptical faces of those around the conference table increasingly show gleams of intrigue as my colleague Shane plugs the Oculus Rift into his computer and pulls up a model in SketchUp or Revit. Without too much introduction, he shows off the model on the 2D screen and then invites someone to sit in the “driver’s seat.” Immediately after donning the pre-release virtual reality headset hardware, the first tester reaches out to touch one of the walls, points at a rafter, a skylight, and remarks about all of the interesting architectural features overhead. I love witnessing this reaction to the experience because it means that the user is fully immersed, walking through a specially realistic representation of the digital model that they just saw on screen. This is how most of our presentations go, to industry professionals and friends alike, at IrisVR. There is nothing quite like stepping out of reality and into a world that only existed in your mind or on a screen moments prior. One architect even stood up after trying a demonstration of the IrisVR beta software and placed his hand over his heart stating that he felt as though he had just walked into a building that he designed for the first time. In the case of this passionate architect and designer, the joy of experiencing his own creation made him feel “butterflies in his stomach.” I was quick to joke that virtual reality sometimes causes motion sickness, especially when using today’s early hardware models that have not yet been perfected. At the same time, the current technology is good enough to show the promise of virtual reality (VR) in the not-so-distant future.

My name is Jack Donovan and I graduated from Champlain College with a degree in Game Programming. I’ve been fascinated with virtual reality and augmented reality since my first Virtual Boy (a 1995 two-tone Nintendo VR console) and I’ve been growing as a programmer ever since. I make non-VR games too; I co-founded an independent game studio incorporated in Vermont called Team Aurora Games and I wrote a book called OUYA Game Development By Example, released by Packt Publishing. My first task at IrisVR was what would evolve to become the bread and butter of our automation process: reading an exported .OBJ file and generating a 3D mesh based on its geometry data. It was a primitive torus shape, something like a donut, and despite its simplicity, seeing it generated on screen properly was exciting. That prototype is a little dated now that our algorithm is able to load in a model of the entire Empire State Building, but I won’t forget that first task as the jumping off point that got me started coding and learning more about virtual reality and procedural mesh generation.

What is z-fighting? It is when two or more objects/surfaces share the same value during z-buffering (the process of deciding which element is seen from that view). In other words, it's when two or more objects are competing to be seen. In SketchUp, it is easy to recognize z-fighting due to its flashy/flickering effect, and in this case I had to delete one of the planes to resolve the issue. Another way to get around this issue is to move the top layer few fractions of an inch away from the bottom layer.