
VR essential to design of Nvidia’s new headquarters - ptrptr
https://archpaper.com/2017/04/gensler-nvidia-new-headquarters/#gallery-0-slide-0
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colmvp
A friend of mine's husband built a new location for his business and the
architecture firm used VR to helped him see what his place would be like. It
seems only logical for much larger initiatives like this one to ensure that a
lot of plans get revised earlier on in the planning process, such as figuring
out the optimal lighting (as mentioned in the article). I'm sure most of us
live in cities where we know of a story of an expensive project that had a
mishaps because of a lack of foresight.

~~~
ethbro
_> I'm sure most of us live in cities where we know of a story of an expensive
project that had a mishaps because of a lack of foresight._

Like most of Gerhy's designs?

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k__
I just talked to a friend of mine who is an architect. He said most buildings
look only good as model and when they are build they are only ugly blocks.

Even when rendered most architects play around with perspective to get their
"ugly blocks" to look nice.

I said they should force the architects to design with VR and let them see the
finished building from above only after they got the important stuff done, so
the focus of the design is the people walking around and not the top down view
on the building.

~~~
i336_
GPUs are capable of highly-realistic rendering now, so this is finally a
viable proposition. And the VR hype will definitely go a long way to making
this a reality.

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shard
The first thing I thought of when I saw the photo of the interior of the
building: panopticon.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon)

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i336_
Have some unrelated Google Maps trivia I just discovered.

1\. Scroll down to the map and the end, and zoom all the way in. For me the
tileset goes back in time to before the building was finished. I initially
thought "wow, Google merged an overhead render from the architect!", but when
I followed the "View larger map" link zooming in showed the completed
building. TIL Maps uses different tilesets for different APIs!

2\. See your avatar at the top-right of the embedded map view? Hover that, and
you'll see "+YourUsername", just like in the old +Google days. Wow :P

I'm guessing this site is using a legacy embed API or something. These were
fun glitches to stumble on though.

~~~
modeless
Looks like zooming in switches to 3/4 perspective view. The top-down and 3/4
perspective images were taken at different times. When you click through to
Google Maps, it will use the WebGL true 3D version which is, understandably, a
completely different tileset. Unless your computer doesn't support WebGL, in
which case you'll see the same 3/4 perspective imagery as before. The embed
never uses WebGL, perhaps because it would be rude for a small embedded map to
use a ton of your GPU memory.

If historical imagery interests you, Google has several options available:

The desktop Google Earth client will show you historical top-down aerial
imagery that you can scrub through with a time slider:
[https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en](https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148094?hl=en)

You can access historical street view imagery through the main Google Maps web
interface: [https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/go-back-in-time-
with...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/go-back-in-time-with-street-
view.html)

For large-scale or global changes, there's
[https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/](https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/)
which is essentially a zoomable video of the entire Earth over the past 30
years at ~30m resolution.

For the true 3D imagery and 3/4 perspective view, I believe there's not
currently a way to view historical versions (perhaps because stitching and
reconstruction continues to improve and older versions would be low quality).

~~~
i336_
> _Looks like zooming in switches to 3 /4 perspective view. (...) When you
> click through to Google Maps, it will use the WebGL true 3D version which
> is, understandably, a completely different tileset. Unless your computer
> doesn't support WebGL, in which case you'll see the same 3/4 perspective
> imagery as before._

Problem: my old laptop _doesn 't_ support WebGL, and I'm seeing the new
building at all zoom levels.

> _The embed never uses WebGL, perhaps because it would be rude for a small
> embedded map to use a ton of your GPU memory._

That makes absolutely perfect sense - another thing is that the embed needs to
"just work", and WebGL is in effect kicking in OpenGL; if the display stack
isn't in sane condition (eg, misconfigured or buggy driver) it may cause
lockups or other issues.

Thanks very much for the other links!

\- Google Earth is on my todo list of things to play with when I'm back on my
i3

\- The historical street view thing is awesome and really useful, I agree

\- TIL about Timelapse, that is awesome. Thanks very much!

Your theory about stitching/reconstruction of old tilesets sounds quite
plausible.

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louithethrid
Why are headquaters allways non-modular? Usually such structures get to small
the day, the company moves in. So why not integrate growth-ability into a
building?

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pkaye
Where is the parking for this new building?

~~~
killjoywashere
If I recall, from the 2016 GTC keynote, the parking is in the basement. The
CEO felt he was voting in favor of the environment by putting the cars
underneath.

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amelius
So where are all the computer generated images?

~~~
i336_
I'm genuinely not sure what you mean. The hero image and the 3rd placement
image are both CGI renders of the final building, FWIW.

~~~
amelius
You are right. But those types of image are also typically made using
conventional techniques (although more labour intensive). VR gives you the
opportunity to show the building from various angles as people would normally
see it, and also from the inside. Hence I was expecting much more images, and
not the typical images you see on a billboard next to a construction site.

~~~
i336_
Very fair point.

I guess the article was trying to drum up hype about the _possibility_ of
being able to do what you describe.

IOW, this news article is saying "this should exist soon" in a "come on, get
with the program" sense, because the industry is not quite there yet.

Having said that, I can perfectly understand your point of view.

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unholythree
I know this is pedantic, but Nvidia isn't really a "microchip maker" as the
article says so much as designer since they're fab-less.

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ptrptr
Message I've received: We thought you might like to know that we put
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125108)
in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page
sometime in the next 24 hours.

This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances
at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and
we won't do it again.

Thanks for posting good stories to Hacker News, Daniel (moderator)

~~~
shouldbworking
I like this, but isn't it essentially the same as manual curation?

Not that I see anything wrong with that. I've lurked /new for a long time and
noticed more and more spammy articles increasing the noise factor. I really
think the whole thing is an arms race for views that can't really be stopped
without a real person in the loop.

Perhaps you could start assigning reputation to a domain that's linked to how
many good articles have come from there? This would encourage "friendly" SEO
spam of good articles at least, lol.

