Autodesk has agreed to acquire The Wild, a cloud-connected, extended reality and virtual reality platform technology firm whose products are used by AEC professionals to make project decisions from inside a 3D model.
The acquisition, whose terms were not disclosed, includes The Wild and IrisVR. the company's namesake product, which is an immersive and interactive virtrual reality/extended reality environment that allows building teams to present, collaborate and review projects together from anywhere. Teams can make changes to the model directly and share files within the cloud-based virtual environment.
Executives from both Autodesk and The Wild said that working remotely through the pandemic increased the needs of designers and VDC teams. with interest in virtrual reality/extended reality up dramatically.
Autodesk首席执行官Andrew Anagnost在一份声明中说：“我们对野外的收购反映了建筑行业的快速转变，从项目的复杂性到设计，建造和运营它们的团队的地理多样性。”新利18备用网址。
野外already had data-rich integrations with Autodesk’s design programs such as Revit and Naviswork before the acquisition and with other design programs such as SketchUp and Rhino3D.
"What we’re really trying to do with immersive collaboration is really create a new workspace for builders to collaborate together," said Gabe Paez, founder and CEO of The Wild. He and Nic Fonta, Autodesk general manager of AR/VR Products, both said they want that workspace to be integral to the tools that professionals use in their workflows. “We want them to collaborate on that content in a seamless way,” Paez said.
While several AR/VR tools exist today to serve designers, keeping up with design and the headset hardware was a focus that made The Wild useful for Black & Veatch, which has used its technology for six years, said Brian Melton, chief technologist at the Kansas City-based design engineer.
“It became very easy just to migrate the design data (over the last year),” he said. "Now, we can move VR data and model data into VR fast enough to keep up with design iteration. It’s become a very useful tool for the design team to talk about the current design, not the design they had last week."
一旦将模型进入VR耳机，对于Black＆Veatch的工作流程，梅尔顿（Melton）专注于过程。与野外合作的完整VR/AR合作的旅程的又一步是，语音到文本的评论变得足够强大，足以使工程公司的设计师在虚拟环境中进行标记。
Speech-to-text comments have been automatically converted into mark-ups in The Wild since 2019 and other engineers no longer needed to take notes in actual reality next to someone inside the model.
"The next thing you want to do is make a comment and then be able to have a closed loop to follow that comment all the way through the design process,” Melton said. "When we started seeing the ability to get the model data into VR much more easily, that was pretty exciting for us."
Autodesk first experimentied with VR in the 1990s, using an early version of AutoCAD, but made the investment now because of how remote work and improved VR technology have come together in recent years.
"We see clear signals that things are different and the time is right," Fonta said. "We’ve never done a move like this one before, so it is proof that we really believe that this is now shifting and a new era is starting."
Autodesk did not immediately disclose a date for the acquisition to close.
