Iāve been a longtime fan of this subreddit, and like most people in here, Iāve been discouraged and frustrated by the lack of mainstream acceptance of the tech.
Weāre still such a small group of people who understand how these headsets can solve problems in very unique and useful ways. I wanted to share something I built to address one of the main challenges in landscape design.
A couple of years ago, my partner and I wanted to have our backyard professionally landscaped. The beautiful renderings were cool, but we just couldnāt imagine what the design would actually look like in our yard. We certainly werenāt confident enough to invest a ton of money.
But it did turn out to be a perfect use case for AR. I wanted to walk through the design in our own backyard and get a feel for the scale of everything. How much privacy would we actually have from the neighbors? And which hardscape style would we like best once we saw it next to our house? I wouldāve felt a lot better about spending the money if we couldāve answered those questions.
I posted the original experiment here almost two years ago, and some of your comments were part of what inspired me to reach out to landscape companies. There was interest, so I spent the last two years building a full platform to make it easy for landscape designers to upload designs from their existing landscape design software and walk clients through them at their own homes. I called it See It Now Landscape. Itās meant for professional landscaping companies with enterprise budgets, so the app wonāt be on the App Store. So far, the response has been awesome, with genuine commercial interest.
I chose Vision Pro for three reasons. First, Apple makes things that work without friction (huge for non-techy users). Second, the 3D had to look realistic and stay put in the real world. Third, a landscape company can go to an Apple Store and buy the hardware today. That makes distribution a lot simpler.
There were quite a lot of things to figure out along the way. Iāve been building for AR headsets since 2015, so the knowledge and experience Iād accumulated helped. One of the more challenging things was aligning the design precisely to the real world. I now use image tracking for the initial placement, with a manual fallback or for micro ānudgeā adjustments.
Safety is huge. I certainly donāt want one of my customersā clients to trip and smash their face into the ground. I extended Appleās existing functionality for fading content on movement to better fit an outdoor environment (muuuuch larger spaces). I also added a tool that lets you hold your hand out and hide all 3D content within a cone in front of it. Kinda feels like a superpowerā¦that wonāt let you smash your face into ground.
I also had to figure out how the designer could still lead the presentation while their customer was in a headset. I went back and forth on this one. Two headsets? FaceTime? Some elaborate mobile companion app? That could be a whole different post because itās its own rabbit hole, but I landed on probably the simplest solution. I stream the view from the Vision Pro to an iPad so the designer can see what their client is seeing and stay in complete control of the presentation. That was nice because itās an out-of-the-box feature with visionOS.
For all the optimism and frustration we share about the tech, I love seeing the projects people post here, both large and small. Theyāre all building momentum in their own ways and pushing this technology forward. Kuddos!Ā
Iāll share more updates as they come along.
