Virtual Reality VR Improvements

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    I work for an architectural practice here in the UK and we've been using Enscape for a while now. Last week, I shared my screen over a Microsoft Teams call with the Head of Planning for a Council and they were blown away by the Enscape presentation. The ability to 'walk' them through the scheme helped sell the scheme.


    Where we've run into problems as an practice is in VR presentations to councils. There are a number of issues that I we've come across

    1 - carrying the PC, VR headset and all the cables, keyboard etc to meetings (laptops not powerful enough for size of model etc)

    2 - setting up PC and VR headset in front of clients/council

    3 - quality of Enscape render. The 'shimmer' on objects and materials in enscape VR is a major issue. It detracts from the experience and caused users to feel dizzy at times.


    The new Oculus Quest 2 might be a solution for the first two points. If there is a way to open a fully pre-rendered file on the Quest 2 that might do the trick.

    Is point 3 regarding the 'shimmer' something currently being worked on?

    Hello AElamin1,


    welcome to the Enscape forum.


    Offsite VR is always a challenge. The best experience is IMHO using a sufficiently beefy laptop (high end "gamer" laptop) and a Oculus Rift S. The Rift S, with it's inside out tracking is really simple to setup and the laptops performance is comparable to a desktop. Although not officially not supported, some users have had some success with setting wireless Oculus Quest up. The Quest is only supported in tethered mode as we don't have a standalone for the Quest. Even the Quest 2 will not have sufficiently beefy hardware to handle Enscape. So in the end you can't skip the PC (laptop) hardware if you want a fully interactive walkthrough.


    A half way solution is rendering a number of stereoscopic panoramas and viewing them with one of the many panorama viewing apps for the Quest.


    The render of Enscape in VR is (almost) no worse than in normal. Only some of the effects become more obvious as the screen resolution per viewing angle becomes less. We are always trying to improve the quality performance, but as things stand if you want real-time global illumination, you need to take some off the visual artifacts into account. Switching to draft mode will remove most of the visual artifacts and replace them with low quality effects; depending on your preferences this may feel "better".


    The VR sickness should not be caused by the visual artifacts, as you can see when you switch the quality mode to draft. This is a special case of motion sickness, which happens to many people and can be trained away if exposed to it allot. We strongly advise not to walk/fly in VR at all and only use teleport, since this does significantly reduce motion sickness. Some people feel safer sitting and some have less nausea when in room scale, you may want to experiment a bit with this.