Virtual Reality Puts Tinkelman Architecture Clients Inside Buildings To See Everything from Interior Walls and Furniture to Exterior Rustling Leaves

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. (March 9, 2023) – To truly experience a building that has not yet been built, it helps to look at more than two-dimensional drawings. It helps to stand amid its surroundings, or inside its rooms, and see not only the walls and furniture, but also the way a breeze blows the trees outside, how water ripples the surface of a swimming pool and how sunlight shifts throughout the day.

This is how Tinkelman Architecture conveys its concepts and designs to clients – with a virtual reality system that places a viewer wherever he or she wants to experience the structure or property.

“Virtual reality goes far beyond traditional desktop drawings in allowing clients to feel what it will be like to view, enter and move around the buildings we design for them,” said Steven Tinkelman, founder and managing member of Tinkelman Architecture.

The firm has employed a virtual reality system since 2017 and has kept on the cutting edge of the technique. The advancement has changed all aspects of architecture, from the overall design to the placement of plumbing and other systems. The program can cut weeks off the time it takes to design a building, when compared with traditional drafting. Changes are made instantly, and the program can be shared with subcontractors to add interior systems.

“This technology helps the designer and the client know the design more intimately from the start,” Tinkelman said. “This greatly improves communication and results in a design that is better understood and can be refined to more closely match the client’s desires and needs.”

Perhaps the most dramatic change that virtual reality brings is the ability to present the plans to clients and others, such as government officials who grant needed regulatory approvals.

Clients appreciate the opportunity to slip on the Vive headset and move around the building that will soon be built, said John Leichter, Tinkelman’s project designer and manager of Building Information Modeling (BIM). With two sophisticated hand controls that are easy to master, a person can move inside or outside the building at will. The program, using Enscape to draw on Revit software, offers an experience of the building that goes beyond even a three-dimensional image. It shows how the building will appear at different times.

“Our virtual reality imaging does a great job of placing you there so that you can see and feel the scale,” Leichter said. “You’re able to jump in, walk around, look up to see how high a ceiling is or how narrow a hallway might be. You can also change the time of day and the time of the year to see what day or night would look like, and the way sunlight falls in winter or summer.”

The program allows its user to virtually test different furniture layouts, room colors and wallpaper patterns. The user also can choose various hypothetical views; they can “turn off” the walls to see the open structure, or rise into the air to view the structure the way a drone would.

The program adds realistic details. A look at the virtual depiction of a residential building rising at 44 Springside Ave. in the Town of Poughkeepsie shows water moving on the surface of the indoor swimming pool while leaves rustle on the trees outside.

At the same time, the image that the viewer sees can be projected onto a computer screen or large flatscreen display monitor.

Tinkelman Architecture is not stopping with virtual reality, however. The developing technology, Leichter said, is augmented reality, which can add or alter a building on a real-life setting to see how it will sit on the site, surrounded by the actual trees, neighboring structures and more.

“We will continue to embrace the latest design tools and advancements to serve our clients and collaborate with them to bring their visions and desires to life,” Tinkelman said. “As with everything we do, technology will serve our core values of providing high quality designs for buildings that are innovative, efficient, attractive and, most of all, functional.”