Soluis Group Extends Virtual Reality Capabilities
UK Digital Creativity specialists The Soluis Group has today announced an expansion to their service offering – acquiring the project portfolio & IP of London-based engineering & process virtual reality specialists Kairos-VR.
The move is seen as both a major enhancement to Soluis’s established capabilities in creating highly-engaging augmented and virtual reality experiences, and in-step with the group’s innovation in the Building Information Modelling (BIM) revolution currently sweeping construction and engineering.
Soluis’s skills in visualisation and the creation of immersive software to deliver visual content have proven increasingly relevant to the challenges of engaging a wider audience of stakeholders using the benefits of BIM.
Kairos’s success in delivering functional applications into specialised engineering and process sectors thus extends Soluis’s ability to offer both virtual and augmented reality as key elements of the BIM workflow – both on a much wider scale, and in an interdisciplinary manner across sectors.
Soluis will also offer Kairos-VR’s existing customer base vastly expanded resources and services, including Computer Generated Visualisation, Motion Graphics, Augmented Reality and App Development
Soluis Interact Showreel from Soluis Marketing on Vimeo.
Cross pollination of both innovators and their IP in this manner is seen as vital to the success of both BIM and VR worldwide, and a linkup between two of the UK’s fastest movers in their respective skills sets will, it is anticipated, help UK BIM adopters realise maximum value from the models and important data derived from the BIM process.
Welcoming the move, Soluis Group Founder and CEO Martin McDonnell said:
‘We believe that Kairos had a vision for improved engagement across the construction sector that we very much shared, and are delighted to be bringing their good work into the Soluis Group structure. ‘We have done this in a manner that means we can continue to progress these ideas and provide a high level of on-going service to their clients. ‘Kairos’s existing solutions for providing specific engineering workflows using BIM data as the source of clear visual presentation fits extremely well with our existing portfolio of solutions.’
The founders of Kairos Virtual Reality, Michael Thuell (CEO) and Alex Strachan (CTO), also gave their view on the acquisition:
“As engineering graduates, we started Kairos with the vision of utilising virtual reality as a powerful tool for comprehending designs and modelling information. By joining Soluis, such a vision can be realised, due to the fantastic skill and passion of the team, allowing us to build on the foothold we have developed within the industry.
We are looking forward to bringing Kairos into such an inherently innovative company such as Soluis, whose drive and aspirations align so closely with our own. It was clear instantly from meeting with Martin and his team that they are pushing the limits of current technology, open-minded, and always looking for ways to develop and implement new and beneficial ideas to such an important industry.
We are confident that virtual reality will revolutionise how the built environment sector operates, eliminating problems at an increasingly earlier stage, and enhancing communication and clarity. By joining Soluis, we now feel we will be at the forefront of this revolution.”
Both Soluis and Kairos are actively encouraging any existing and respective clients to get in touch about the linkup, and are keen to explore how their expanded IP and specialisms can address existing needs and proposed methodologies for enhancing project communications.
Further information on The Soluis Group’s products and services can be obtained from Fergus Bruce (fergus@soluis.com / 07799 766802) or Scott Grant (scott@soluis.com) at 0141 548 8686.
- About The Soluis Group Limited
The Soluis Group incorporates several operating divisions that offer the very best in client presentation and stakeholder engagement.
Founded in 2000, Soluis have established a reputation for flexibility, innovation and quality in delivering exceptional service that helps their clients to connect more effectively with clients and project partners.
Clients benefit from the Group’s highly developed and nuanced understanding of architecture, construction and the medium of computer generated visualisation. As a result clients enjoy real and valuable results enabling them to secure contracts, win competitions, achieve planning permission and enhance marketing coverage of their projects.
Soluis have also been innovating at the interface of high-end visuals and proprietary software and apps for several years, and are at the centre of the current wave of BIM adoption in the UK. They focus on making BIM accessible and understandable to stakeholders of all description, and recent work in virtual reality has created exciting possibilities for user immersion in unbuilt architecture and industrial design.
- About Kairos-VR
Kairos VR’s service takes architecture, engineering and property development projects into a constructed environment to allow them to be viewed with a virtual reality headset. Kairos has utilised the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to provide a highly convincing stereoscopic simulation with an accurate depth of field. It is truly possible to get a grasp for how a building or room will feel in reality.
Kairos can aid designers, visionaries and property developers to be fully immersed within a project to create a greater understanding of available information, unachievable on conventional display technology. This service can then be delivered to the designer’s clients allowing them to describe the concept, portraying the detail and complexity of their future project in an easy to understand, intuitive format.
- About Building Information Modelling (BIM).
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a fast becoming the standard delivery process for construction worldwide and revolves around the digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility from earliest conception to demolition. This consistent shared digital asset enables greater certainty and efficiency at all stages and the models and data generated provide project teams with the basis for informed decision making at each stage of the built asset’s life-cycle.
- About Augmented and Virtual Reality
Augmented Reality is a major growth technology in the digital space. It allows users to view and interact with digital content on hand-held devices like smart phones and tablets, but in real time and associated directly with real-world objects.
This could be as simple as pointing a device at a wall and being able to see and interact with overlaid information about the building – or as complex as mapping an entire, photo-realistic model of a building onto the empty site on which it will one day sit.
Virtual reality takes this further by fully immersing the user in a digitally modelled environment – typically by use of a headset with inbuilt cameras (e.g. Oculus VR – recently acquire by Facebook for $2bn). This then allows the user to ‘walk’ around the environment on questions and interact directly with its elements in real time.
These technologies have some particularly exciting applications in construction and engineering, facilitating both commercial and process/delivery functions of these sectors with accurate, rich model data, related directly to real world contexts with full interactivity, and allowing engagement with technical or high-profile information at low risk and with the necessary information to make informed and justified decisions based upon it.