SketchUp was by far my favourite tool to use in the development of 3D environments during the course of my study. However, SketchUp is predominantly aimed at a market of architectural developers. It’s one of the continuum of 3D applications that is meant for the production of real estate and architectural models, and we see this in VR as well.
One of the advantages of this from a VR journalism perspective is that it enables the rapid development of living spaces, and living spaces are where events and news take place. However, there are difficulties in translating SketchUp into virtual reality; there are always a number of stages to go through, and it’s difficult to test working programs being developed in SketchUp, in VR, without a specific plugin or extension.
That’s the utility of VR Sketch; it enables two distinct things. The first is that it is a viewer which allows users to see their models in virtual reality using an Oculus Quest or other VR headset. When we use VRSketch to view models, they appear in two different environments; we can see them inside a warehouse using as a model on a table, or we can teleport into the model and walk around it as though it’s a real space. Both of these views have their different strengths.
Not only can we view our models in VR, but we can also edit them. We can go into a model and change textures, remove elements, scale elements, and even bring in assets that already exist within the model and duplicate them. So it’s a really powerful tool to bring some of those SketchUp features into virtual reality. The second main feature of VRSketch is it has a limited subset of the object and 3D model creation tools that exist in SketchUp. So we can create new environments in VR Sketch, and because VR Sketch is linked back to SketchUp, any changes that we make in these environments are automatically sent back to your computer.
Feelings
I personally found that developing and altering models within VR Sketch was of little utility to me. Being able to step inside my model and teleport around it to see how it worked and functioned in virtual reality, that’s a really powerful visualisation tool and feature. I found myself going back to the desktop version of SketchUp to make my amendments and changes rather than use the features that are in VRSketch. However, that doesn’t mean that those features aren’t welcome; it’s useful to be able to quickly change the colour of a wall, for example, while you’re actually in that situation, or change a specific little detail. It’s useful as well for lighting, for changing the position of lights within a model before rendering at high resolution.
Evaluation
Overall, VR Sketch is a polished, professional tool that works fairly seamlessly. However, the way that SketchUp models are brought into the system is a little bit cumbersome. You need to connect to the version of SketchUp that you’re using in your headset, which means taking your headset off and typing in a code. But once that’s established, it’s easy to use and has a full feature set. One concern is that the program has not been developed significantly since it was originally created six years ago. Although there have been tweaks here and there, for example, to allow users to create their own environment to work in, not a lot of new features or functionality have been added.
Application
The application of the program to VR journalism is fairly transparent. It means that prototype spaces can very quickly be assembled in SketchUp, whether they are derived from a 3D model that’s been photographed, metrically scanned, or built from scratch in SketchUp, or assembled using assets found online or in Google’s 3D Warehouse. It provides us with a quick way to examine a model in virtual reality to test that it functions correctly, that the space feels right, that the scale is right, and that it is sufficiently immersive before deploying it to a platform where we may then add interactivity, like for example, as a part of an immersive journalism development workflow, it’s a good tool to use.
Conclusions
VR Sketch is comparable to Arkio, another popular tool for working with existing 3D models in VR. However, the recent release of an official SketchUp viewer application with similar features has somewhat diminished VRSketch’s value as a subscription service, especially for existing SketchUp users who can now use the viewer for free.