Greg Howes is the founder and CEO of the high-tech building company IDEAbuilder, and he’s on a mission to disrupt the $8.5 trillion annual building industry using immersive technologies to bridge design & fabrication directly with consumer demand. He uses computer-aided manufacturing and robotics to fabricate buildings, and he’s been investigating how AR, VR, and MR can help to revolutionize the process of communicating ideas around space. Greg predicts that the combination of computer-aided manufacturing with immersive technologies has the potential to more directly connect the supply and demand of manufacturing resulting in a trend towards more customization and personalization of all types of products and services.
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For a number of years now, Greg has been investigating how immersive technologies were going to change the construction business through his company IDEAbuilder. The building industry lives and breathes 3D data, and there are a lot of inefficient interoperability file issues that require designers to move back and forth between 2D and 3D data.
He’s hoping that as design and manufacturing processes increasing become more automated and digitized that there will be a more seamless way to go directly from an immersive VR experience directly to a computer-aided manufacturing process. He imagines that it’d be possible to get dynamic updates on the cost to manufacture an object based upon customizations that were made within an interactive 3D environment.
He says that the immersive technologies of AR, VR and MR all represent the most intuitive and efficient away to share design ideas about space. There are an infinite number of use cases, but building them out is going to be the real challenge. He expects that there will be a lot of demand-driven innovation from consumers once they’re able to directly participate within the design process.
In the end, he sees that these immersive technologies will enable faster, better, cheaper physical and digital products and services that are personalized and highly customized.
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