Getting Inside Infrastructure

ANDREW MANZE: Hello, everyone. My name is Andrew Manze, technical marketing manager here at Autodesk. And welcome to this talk on Getting Inside Infrastructure.

So I'll just draw your attention to this safe harbor statement. You've probably seen it before. But I'd just like you just to take a couple of minutes to read through this, maybe just pause, have a read through. And then when you read through it, just move on.

OK, so, visualization and virtual reality. I'm going to be talking about that through the lens of infrastructure projects, which provide their own challenges in many different ways. I'm going to be going through those.

So we'll start off with looking at the challenges and the equipment, especially for the VR side. And then we'll dig into the software a little bit, firstly with the desktop visualizations. So we'll look at InfraWorks very briefly. And then we'll look at Twinmotion for Revit. And then we'll push on through the virtual reality products.

OK, so visualization challenges. They fall into three categories, really. But the biggest one is scale, I think, and then the suitability of the tools-- not always applicable to what we want to do for infrastructure-- and then also the complexity of some of those tools.

So scale, I think, is-- as I say, I think that is the biggest challenge, no pun intended. But the tools available are generally geared towards smaller-scale projects. So they may have started off life as products that dealt with building structures and things of that nature, smaller-scale projects.

Now, they may have expanded their scope over the years to include infrastructure. But you'll find that they're still missing some of the things that we need for effective visualization of those types of projects. So that brings other things to it, so a greater need for more powerful PC equipment and also VR equipment, as we'll see later.

We might have to create models with less detail in order to cope with the large size we deal with. We have the option, of course, to create poorer-quality visualizations because of that or do nothing at all. But if we do opt for poor-quality visualizations, sometimes that can be counterproductive in trying to convince the stakeholders of what we're proposing.

And then the suitability of the tool. So, as I said earlier, sometimes these are building-centric tools which have expanded to include infrastructure or at least have the capability to deal with infrastructure-type projects. But it's not just the scale and being able to handle the scale. It's also to do with the content that's available in those particular products.

So on some of these products, you'll find desk lamps, tables, chairs, people, cars, things like that you'd expect to see around building simulations or visualizations. But you won't find any bridges or trains, switchgear, things like that. They won't exist, and you'll have to source those yourself.

And then we'll go to complexity. So many of these tools are highly complex to use. Now, they're necessarily complex because they were originally produced for a different purpose. So some of them have got very long learning curves that sometimes seem never-ending. But, again, little content available for infrastructure-type projects, but they're still usable.

Now, if you imagine that we have those challenges to deal with when we're dealing with infrastructure projects, and then you move to VR, where you've got another set of hardware to worry about, you can imagine it can be a bit of a nightmare. So in terms of headsets for virtual reality, there's a lot on the market. There's a lot on the market. And they vary from really cheap to really, really expensive.

I've given a selection of some that are currently available here. It's not an exhaustive list by any means, and it's probably not up to date. Certainly, wouldn't want to be going on to Amazon trying to find those sorts of prices. But you'll notice that they look very different. But they do land into one of two buckets.

So you've got the ones that we would call inside out. So that's where all the tracking is done by the headset itself. And then you've got the other type, outside in, where you have a set of base stations outside of the headset equipment positioned in different parts of the room. And they track the movements that way.

Those ones are also usually tethered by cable to your hardware, so your PC hardware. And they're generally using the power of the PC to do most of the work, as opposed to the inside out ones, which are not tethered. And they're trying to do most of the work inside the headset itself. But that brings its own challenges.

So I'm just going to move on to just pick out a couple of those. So the mighty Meta Quest 2 at the top there, extremely popular. I think most kids got one of those for Christmas last year. They're really cheap, and they do a really good job for games and things of that nature that are specifically designed for them.

For our sort of application, for running infrastructure visualization projects on them, it is a bit of a struggle because it's doing all the work in the headset. But it's so convenient compared to the other tethered-type systems.

You can also see that they are much lighter as well. And they can just sit on your desk. And if you need to explore something in VR very quickly, you can just put it on. It's really that simple.

If you look at a tethered system, you get a much better experience-- high resolution, high refresh rate. They are a little bit heavy on your head, but they also have more strapping and sort of a cradle for your head to keep it there. But they're a lot more expensive.

And the point that I think I would make here is that you really do need somewhere dedicated to set it up because you need a clear-- you really need a clear area to set it up in. You need to set up the base stations in the corner. They have to be so far apart. And you've really got to want to do VR to go down and set yourself up and use it.

Whereas with the standalone systems like the Meta Quest, it's the ultimate in convenience. You can just pop it on and use it. But you are going to get those compromises. So the equipment that we use, it's important to note that that will determine pretty much what is possible. So the standalone headsets, they offer the ultimate in convenience. But they do have much lower performance.

Now, with the Meta Quest, there is the option of adding a cable and cabling it up to your PC and using SteamVR to run it. But, in my experience, it's not as powerful as running a dedicated tethered system. But, of course, the tether system, you get that high performance. But there's lots of equipment to manage. It's really inconvenient, and you need loads of space to do it.

OK, so with building projects, you can get away with the Meta Quest far easier because you can compartmentalize the data that you're going to use at any one time. With infrastructure projects, you really need to load everything because we don't have the convenience of walls that we can't see through so that people can't see the other side. As far as they're concerned, everything's loaded, and you're just going between rooms.

But what will actually happen is that you will just load-- if you're down in the bottom right-hand corner there, you would just load that amount of data, explore that. And then using the controls, you will move to the next viewpoint, where you'll unload the previous one and load the next one. And that is how you can cater in building large building projects just by compartmentalizing the data and doing it that way. But for, as I say, infrastructure projects, that's a bit of a struggle.

OK, something I thought I would just mention-- and people are going to say, why is Andy talking about glasses? Well, I didn't realize this. But you may notice I wear spectacles, glasses. And I didn't realize how inconvenient they're going to be while you're working in VR. Working with headsets, trying to get your glasses off because you have to put them inside the headset first and then offer it up and sort of wiggle it on and then-- it's a nightmare.

And then the distance between the glasses themselves and the displays is critical to the experience that you're going to get. And then you find that not only are they uncomfortable, they fog up. But they also scratch the front of your glasses if they touch.

Now, there are some solutions to that. So some headsets provide spacers that you can use to give you some distance between the front of your glasses and the displays. But then if you've got to hand it to someone else, then it's all going to come apart and be redone.

There are actually prescription lens inserts. I think that is probably the best way to deal with it. And they're not very expensive at all. And they're also easy on, easy off as well, so they're actually quite a good option.

OK, so working with infraprojects generally, just be mindful of the equipment limitations. They're going to make a big difference to what you can achieve in terms of the quality. Try and take a book out of-- a page out of the book of building projects. Don't load everything if you don't need to. So if you only really need to work on an area, just load that, and that will work for you quite well.

Remove anything nonessential. Depending on the type of systems you're going to be using, you might be able to get reflections and stuff like that. Try and keep all that sort of stuff to a minimum including trees and leaves and stuff like that. Just make sure you're using the right tool for the job.

OK, so what I want to do now is actually dig into some of these tools and see what we can-- see what we can do with them. So visualization for infrastructure, so this is desktop visualization. I'm going to cover two products, InfraWorks and Twinmotion for Revit.

Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on InfraWorks. It's quite a well known product. Most people know what it can do. It's a pretty good modeler. It can aggregate data from lots of different places very quickly. So if you've got stuff in Civil 3D, Revit, any number of other products, you can pull all that data in and build a model pretty quickly.

Now, there is some visualization you can do in that, and it's not bad at all. But the reason I'm going to use it today is as a way of aggregating the data and then creating a single file that I can then push to Twinmotion as the basis of a much better visualization.

OK, so, as I say, InfraWorks, it's been around for quite a long time. It's been well, well documented, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. But I will look at Twinmotion for a little bit longer, where we can create these much higher-quality visualizations pretty quickly and pretty easily, actually.

OK, so this is a model which I've put together in InfraWorks. So it's a rail project. There's some ground here that would have come in with the model builder, so that was generated automatically. There's also some grading from Civil 3D, some alignments from Civil 3D, and then some Revit models for the structures.

Now, as I say, you can do some visualization inside of this. So what I'm going to add is just add some trees in, just going to click around the perimeter, and they'll come in. They'll come in quite dense. And then you can make changes to that, so you can Adjust the Density. And you can deselect it, and it will look quite-- it'll look quite nice. They're not bad at all. So just I'll spin that around. You can have a look. They look pretty good.

So what else can we do? So trees. You'll want cars and lorries and stuff like that, so you just use the same tool. Just go for a search for what you want. So you can type in car or vehicle or something like that and then select from the menu. Just double-click where you want it to be. And then you can manipulate it into the position that you want.

And then you can add any number of those to make it realistic. But everything is static. We've got-- not really able to create anything moving in InfraWorks. It is possible, but it's quite difficult. So it's not something that we generally do.

So I'll just add a few people in here, just double-click them in place. And you can see that's what you've got. And you can spend some time in here and build it out quite nicely. And you'll see when we get to the VR stuff, that's what I've done. And it works pretty well for that.

But for what we want to do for desktop visualization, we want something a little bit better. So I'm just moving to another proposal that doesn't have any of the trees in that I've just added. You can pull those trees across, and they do look good. But they're just not as good as the Twinmotion ones.

So I'm going to create a single FBX file here. So I'm just going to window around the site a little bit, just thinking about what I want to pull in. Not too much, obviously, but just enough so that we can create something nice.

And then we're just going to make sure we know where we're putting that file. We're going to create a Single File with all the data rather than individual files. And we're just going to name it. I think we'll call it, what, Viz or something. Yeah. And then we hit Export, and that will create that FBX file for us.

So this took a little time, so I've just sped this up a little bit. Everything else is in real time apart from the never-ending progress bars. OK, so what I'm doing now is I've just flipped over to Twinmotion. And we are going to pull in that file.

So we just go to Import, and we're going to connect to that data that we've just created. So there it is there. Just click Open. And there's going to be a few configuration screens which we're going to-- which we're going to use.

So I'm going to let it automatically convert the units. It does that pretty well. And for InfraWorks, I've found that you can leave most of this as is. So it's going to read that data. Keep any conflicts. Keep Both materials seems to work OK.

And then it's going to bring this data in, and it will look as though nothing has happened. And that is because of the way InfraWorks is working with the coordinate system. It's actually placed it a lot higher than the plane that you're looking at here. So you can just nip up and find it. It's pretty easy.

Now, I have seen a lot of people in the past try to then grab hold this whole model and drag it down to the plane at the bottom there. That's not necessary. You don't need to do that. You can stay here and create everything you need, and it all works perfectly well.

OK, so as you can see, we've got the model there. And that's a pretty good representation of what we'd had in-- what we had in InfraWorks. But now we're going to embellish it, and we're going to make it better.

So the first thing we're going to look at is the Ambience. So in a similar way to what you can do in InfraWorks, you can change the Time of Day, the direction of the sun. But you can do loads more in Twinmotion. So the intensity of the sun, you can change-- the size of the sun, reflections.

And then, at night time, of course, instead of it just being black, you can get the moon intensity, get reflections from that and how many stars you want to see, all that sort of stuff. And spend some time in here. You can get it looking quite nice.

You can also play with the Weather. So you just slide that along, and there you can see we've got rain. And then if you make it rainy but in the winter, then you end up with snow. So you might want to demonstrate something in your story with a snow scene or something like that. That's all possible. But, for today, we'll keep it relatively nice with just a few clouds in the background.

OK, so what can we do to change the physical model itself? So the first thing we want to look at really are some of the materials. So we have a Materials library in Twinmotion for Revit, and we maybe want to change the structure there.

So at the moment, it looks like it's come through some sort of default concrete. But maybe that really needs to be metal of some sort. So you can just drag and drop these materials on, and that's pretty much it. They're on there, and then it's for you to then play with the settings for that particular application of that material to see how you want to make it look.

So that looks very shiny. So if it's outside, you can add a bit of Grunge to it. It makes it look as though it's been outside for a while, just a little bit weathered. And there's some other things you can do with Luminosity and reflectivity.

OK, so the next thing we might want to look at is that glass roof. So if we just go to Glass, we can pick up maybe a green glass just to make it look so it's different. Just drag it on, and that's carried that out for us.

And then we looked at-- we had trees in InfraWorks, didn't we? So let's have a look at how we can add trees in Twinmotion. So if we go down to the bottom there and hit Populate, you'll see you get a button there for Foliage and then also for Paint.

And what we can do is we can go to the Trees library. And we can pick a tree, and we can drag and drop it into that box if I can find that box again. There we go. So I just drag it across.

And then you have a default circle, which you can then paint the trees on with. So if you've got a large area, you can increase that. So you just paint them along like this, and what we'll do is we'll paint that area. We should just try and be careful not to go over the edge.

There are ways to make that happen automatically, but that'll be for another day. So we'll paint some more over on the other side. And I think maybe we'll do a few more back there in the distance, and then we'll configure it. So just a little bit over there, maybe. That will do. OK.

And then what we can do is we can then start to configure that. So we can reduce it over there, put it over there. But what we're really interested in doing is changing the Density and the Age of these trees.

So if we just click on the tree icon there, you'll notice we get some controls for Density. So they're just sliders, so you can just slide those up and down. And then you can make them a little bit more mature, like so. I'd like to have a few more actually in there, make it a little bit more dense.

And then they can also change with the seasons as well. So you can select a Season that you want them to react as. Or you can just set it to Auto, and it will set itself to the time of year that the model happens to be in.

So they're nicely variegated, as you can see. But from a distance, they look quite nice, but for some visualizations, you might want to be close up or have just maybe a little bit of the tree in sight. So you can actually see close up, the leaves do actually move. So that's quite nice if you're creating a nice view for a particular simulation.

OK, so what can we do now to get a bit of movement into the visualization? So we can actually create moving cars. So if we go up to the Populate area, you'll notice you've got Characters, Bicycles, Vehicles, and Custom, which we'll look at a little bit later. But if you hit Vehicles, basically what you can do is just draw a path where you want to see these vehicles coming through.

Sometimes it's a bit of a challenge, so I'm going quite slowly here. But I think I do make-- I've made a mistake there I can see. So let's come back and fix that. But we'll just take that to the end. And as you see, as I'm drawing it out, I'm also getting some cars coming through.

I'll just have to make a bit of a change there. That seems to be working OK. There we go. Just fix that end. OK, so that's working in one direction. We can have it working in two directions like that. And then you can change the density and obviously the speed of those as well.

OK, so let's see if we can go inside. It's starting to look quite nice, but let's go inside and see if we can do something in there. So I think probably the first thing we need to do is to maybe build it out a little bit. It looks a bit bare in there.

So maybe we can start adding some benches or something, some trash cans, maybe a few planters, stuff like that to make it look a little bit more realistic. So, again, there's some built-in content here for that.

So, again, everything's drag and drop, so you just drag it in. It'll find something to sit on, so you don't have to worry so much about the height of these items. It will find a surface. It doesn't have to sit on a surface. You can have things up in the air. But by default, that's what they'll do. So we can pick up a planter, put that in, maybe push that over to the side. OK.

And then if we find a Trash Can, maybe-- you got to pick one of those on the left. Zoom in a little bit. Now just pop it over there, rotate it around so it looks like it's roughly right. OK. So there's a few things that we've done just to build it out. And you can imagine you can spend a lot of time on this making it actually look quite nice.

I think the next thing we can do is add some passengers. So if we go back to Populate at the bottom, and this time we'll choose Characters. And then in the same way as we did with the vehicles, we just need to trace a path out. And you'll see there'll be some people coming through like so.

And you can manipulate those as well. There's lots of settings over the ethnicity of the models that you're using, the type of clothing, and then how many people you want, so the density, and the width of the track that you want them to walk through.

So in addition to people that are walking around, we can actually also have static people and animated static people, if that makes sense. So what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to pull from the Library a few examples of that.

So if we go to Characters-- so Groups. So you can grab a group of people and put them there. They are individually configurable if you want to-- if you want to-- if you want to change what they're doing individually. And you can just rotate those two around.

And then you can also grab individuals. So let's pop him in there. There we go. And then, of course, as I said, you can configure all the people individually. But let's just look at him. So you can change what he's doing, change what he's wearing. You can have him lying on the floor if you want to or even dancing. You can do all these things just to align with the story that you happen to be telling.

OK, so I suppose the thing we really need to deal with now is the fact that there's-- the fact that there's not a train. So this was one of the things that I was talking about earlier is that although we have something here that does work for infrastructure projects, sometimes there isn't the content.

Now, we're lucky that we can actually bring in external content for this. So I have a train or an FBX of a train which I've used in the past. And I actually think I took this from InfraWorks at some point as a model, stripped it down, and then created this. So we can use that.

So now that's been imported. We can add that to the User Library. And if we got to the User Library, you'll see that there's now a-- there is now a train item that we can utilize. And the way that we're going to use this is by using another path. But instead of a Vehicle path, we're going to use a Custom path.

And allows us to really drop anything onto that path and animate it. So I'm just going to guess here roughly where I think we want it to go. Obviously, as you saw earlier, you can change these later on. So I'm just going to make a short track just outside the main building and then just pull it along down to the other end. We won't focus on the little bit at the end there. OK.

So that's created that pathway. And if you look carefully when I move across, you might notice that there is actually a-- there is just a white block running along that track. OK. So if we select the Path, we can find that block.

And what we need to do is we need to replace it. So all we need to do to do that is to drag and drop our train all the way across, drop it onto that block, and the train should have replaced it. So as you can see, it's not in the correct orientation. It's at some strange orientation because that's how it was-- that was how it was originally defined. But we have some tools where we can rotate that around. So I think 270 degrees is probably somewhere correct.

OK, so now we've got a train moving along and coming into the station. So let's zoom in and have a quick look at that as it's coming in. Let's navigate down. OK. And we can play with this, so we can change the-- we can make it go backwards and forwards, loop, do it one time only. We can change the Speed. There's lots of things that we can do to match what we really want it to do.

So if we speed it up a little bit, and we'll wait till it comes round again. Here it comes. So it's a little bit more impressive when it's moving along a little bit. So that's our little animation of the train itself.

So you can imagine that even if you need to spend just a little bit of time on a visualization with Twinmotion for Revit, you can get some quite nice effects. I know the name is Twinmotion for Revit, but you don't have to be a Revit user to make use of it. You just need to have a subscription just to get access.

But, yeah, you can use this for all of your infrastructure projects. And once you've spent a little bit of time-- once you've spent a little bit of time on it, you could create something-- this is something I did a little while ago. So the same model, but I've just spent a little bit of time working on that.

Same scene. So it's early during the daytime. Passengers are coming in. The train's come in. There's people milling around. And then later in the day, there's more people moving around. And then some of the passengers are on, and now the train's moving away. And you can see with the lighting effects which are also available to you, you can create quite an atmospheric effect for portfolio visualizations.

And this was another rail one that I did a little while ago. This is mostly inside. So I've got lots of trains moving around and lots of people at different levels of the structure. Yeah, it really tells a story of that station.

OK, so that's I think where I'm going to finish with the desktop visualization. And now I want to move on to the virtual reality side of things. So for VR for infrastructure, you've really got two-- we've really got two products, as we stand, that we're interested in.

The first one is called The Wild. And this is a-- as it says there, it's a fantastic, immersive collaboration platform where people can get inside the environment, work together, and visualize the work that they're working on and make decisions based on what they're looking at.

There's some great integrations with other tools like Revit and Navisworks. So there's lots of ways of working with this. So this is a video of me. Basically, I'm in the environment, but I'm presenting the environment to some other people. So what I'm doing, I'm just going to give them a guided tour of the project.

So I've got some automated points where I can move to discuss what I want to show them. And they can be in-- they can be in VR as well. They can be in that environment at the same time, or they can just be watching from their desktop.

And as I'm talking here, I'm obviously concerned about this little area with that pipe being too close to that stanchion. And so I can use the annotation tools to highlight the area that I might be concerned about. Just using the annotation tools-- you can have different colors and things like that-- to try and get over what you're trying to say. So you get the idea for that.

The other thing, of course, is it's a great exploration tool. So you can get inside these projects. As I say, you can collaborate. Here there's two people collaborating inside a building. And they're pulling up the plans, and they can see them in front of them and work on them. So that's really useful for collaborating on projects. It's a great tool for that.

However, what I'm going to say is that I think it lacks the horsepower for real infrastructure virtual reality. It's a great system. But I've found my personal experience is that I would usually go for something like Prospect instead because it seems to handle larger models much better.

So this is another VR tool that we can use. Again, it's a collaboration platform similar to The Wild, has integrations with the Autodesk tools. But I think it handles the larger projects much better.

OK, so how do we use these? So we can use InfraWorks as the basis of our VR experience as we did with Twinmotion. So I'm going through that process again. But you can see this particular InfraWorks model, I've built it out a little bit more than the other one that we looked at because this is what we're going to be seeing in the VR experience.

So I'm going to create an FBX from this. So similar process as before. But, again, just being mindful of exactly what I need to create an experience for. So I don't want it to-- I don't want to pull in too much. But I don't want to pull in too little either. So just be careful of that.

So I'm just going to window around the site, just pulling in a few things. I'm coming in a little bit closer to the alignment there, not wanting to pick up too much extraneous data there. Coming around the back, and then we'll probably stop it around there.

And then, of course, it's exactly the same as before. Just need to put it somewhere and then click Export. And that will produce our FBX. Just give it a name and then go.

OK, so, as with last time, I did speed this up a little bit so we don't have to sit there for five minutes checking and waiting. So that's done that. And then we're going to swap into the Prospect system.

Here we are. And you can see all my projects on the left-hand side there. But I'm going to create a new project for this particular one. So we just go up to the top there. Click Create Project. Type in the name.

And I'm going to call this a Synced Project. So what that means is that it's going to collect this data, and it's going to send it to the cloud. So it's going to be accessible from the internet so that I can share it with other people. But it'll also sync to the internal headset app as well. So if you've got a Meta Quest 2, there is an app which runs in a standalone mode in the headset.

So we're going to experience this in three different ways, in fact. So it's going to import it now. It's then going to sync it, which I have sped up a little bit. And then we're going to fire up the desktop viewer first. So this is a very good way of very quickly getting the data in and viewing it on the desktop in a very quick way without having to get all your VR equipment out.

So we're going to Launch it here. Now, what it will do-- it will fire up the desktop viewer. And at the same time, it's going to expect you to have a headset. So when SteamVR fires up, it's going to give some-- it's going to say that the headset isn't there.

But we don't care. We can close that down, and we're just going to run it in the desktop viewer. There you go. So we can just close that down because we don't need it right now. We will in a minute, but not right now. And it only takes a second, really, for this to pop up.

And what it'll bring us-- it will bring us into this anteroom, almost, with the model available there. And as you can see, that's our scale model. So this is actually really cool. With the headset on-- this is awesome-- you can look at it as though the model was in your hand. It's actually pretty cool.

But for now, we're just going to click in. And now we're at-- we're at a one-to-one scale, but we're seeing it on our desktop using the viewer. And you can see exactly what we've got. So we can start to go around, explore the model. So you can see there's a bit more in there than it was before. We've got some people. Obviously, the trains.

And there's a number of tools that we can use in the desktop mode, which is useful. Obviously, we can create photos, like screenshots of the views that we're looking at. And we can also create Viewpoints. And this is useful because these will sync across, and you can use them when you've got the headset on.

So, yeah, you can set up an experience for someone else. And then when they go in there, they can just use these Viewpoints. And it'll drive them around the-- drive them around the environment.

So we're just going to create a few of these, I think. So just need to look in the direction that you want, and that is the Viewpoint that will be saved. And then you can actually instantly click between them. So you can then move along. We'll create one more just on this edge, I think. Go a little bit further.

There we are. So we'll create it there. OK. So we've got those points, and we can just click between those at will. OK. And they'll be good for us to use in a minute. So we can explore this a little bit further and get close up with some of these guys.

So you can see some of the other buildings in the distance that were pulled in when we exported that file. They're all there, and they seem to work quite well. But you've got to remember, I'm using this on a desktop machine. So it's obviously very, very powerful.

But now what we can do is we can see what it's like if we Launch it into a headset. So this particular one, I'm using a Meta Quest 2 with a cable. So I'm using the cable for this.

And what you'll notice is watching on the desktop, it's quite jittery because of the movements of the head. You're not aware of this when you're using the headset, of course. But when someone else is viewing it from the outside, as we're going to, you'll notice there's a little bit of jitteriness in the recording.

Now, if you need to produce VR content for other people to consume in a similar way to what we're doing now, there is another way to record internally in the headset. And there are a lot of-- there are a lot of tools there to smooth a lot of this out. And we'll have a look at that in a moment.

But while we're here, we'll just use those-- we'll use those Viewpoints to move around. So that was useful. We had those put there for us when we were working on the desktop viewer. And we can use them while we're in the headset. There he is.

OK. And we can still move around. We're free to move around, of course. And we can move around and change direction using our head. Or there are some tools on the handsets to spin you around, so you don't have to-- you don't have to strain your neck when you're doing this sort of thing.

So we're just going to explore a little bit up here. But what we can do is we can go down and have a look at some of these bridges. So there's a few things we can do here So there are some tools that are going to help us collaborate with others on the production of this project.

So there's Annotations-- not animations, Annotations-- that we can do. So you can free-draw things. You can add Shapes, add all manner of Shapes to that to draw some attention to something. As I say, you can free-draw. Just choose a color and draw using the handset. Obviously, you can rub things out, things that you don't want. OK.

And then there's another thing that we can use, and that is a way to record and track issues. So what we'll do, I think in a moment, is we'll create one. But I think for-- are we going there now? We're going to Measure first. I think we're measuring.

OK, so some of the Measure tools. So you can just point at various things, and it will measure between faces. So you can see that working there. So you can get the clearances. You can get distance between the piers, for instance. Getting a bit closer makes it a bit easier.

There you go. So you can get the distance between the piers there and the height, which I think is-- what does it say-- just over 5 meters. OK. So good way of gathering info while you're actually in the environment.

But, as I say, you can actually create Photos here as well. So we created photos in the desktop app, but we can also create them here. So you just look in the direction that you want to be. And then you click the trigger, and it creates a photo for you that you can then share. You can create as many of those as you want.

All right. So just exploring some of the other tools. But the one I really want to talk about, really, is the one where we can create issues. So if there was something that you were particularly worried about, you can highlight an area and create an Issue.

So we're worried about something up there. So let's go to Issue Tracking. And we're going to say Create an Issue and then point to the part that you want to create the Issue for. Squeeze the trigger, and it brings up this Issue panel for you where you can actually type in some of the information that you want to impart to other people.

So, in this case, we're going to check the-- we're going to check the clearance. I'm typing in here on the virtual keyboard, but there is a voice dictation function as well, which I'll show you in a minute. So you can then change the Type of issue it is, the seriousness of the issue, and what the Status is. And then you can close it down.

Now, you will have a list of these in that panel. And if we move off track a little bit, and then we want to go back to that Issue, we only have to click it. And it automatically teleports us to that place where we can examine the item which is causing concern.

OK, so back to Viewpoints. And I think we're going to just explore a little bit further. And then what we're going to do is we are going to see a little bit of video created with this model but using the internal recorder on the Meta Quest 2 headset.

So for that, I have invoked all the possible quality improvement tools for the recording of a VR experience. So I think that is at the end of this-- at the end of this video. So we're just coming out.

And here he is. So this is recorded in the standalone situation on the headset. And as you can see, it's much, much more stable. And that is because there's lots of de-judder and de-shake tools in the headset, and you get a much better recording of an experience.

So for the user, if you've got the headset on, this is completely transparent to you. It makes no difference whether you have all this stuff on or not. But it makes a difference in terms of if you have to create some video of a VR experience for someone else to consume.