Augmented Reality - Check this out at The ANT Group

Jim Balding (The ANT Group) tweeted about this the other day and I just didn't get a chance to mention it as quickly as I wanted. Robert Manna posted about it today too.

AR Media provides a free authoring plug-in, with limited functionality, it doesn't cost much more to take it up a notch. Jim's site has big button on the left of his logo to download his demo kit. AR has more demo files on their site too.

Here's a photo of paper "plans" (printed and cutout) for hotel rooms on a table (printed out and placed by hand), like cutouts that you can move around to experiment with the best arrangement.

Then you can run the AR tool to see how they work in 3D too.

I'm not sure if Jim is planning to include it during the Glorious Gadgets session at RTCUSA or not, but sure looks like a candidate to me.

Watch this video for a quick demo too.

Existing Rooms and Their Tags

Demo plans need room tags so a contractor knows what room to demo stuff in. Room tags can't tag a room in a demo plan because the current phase is set to new construction.

How can you get room tags to identify the existing rooms? Overlay views on a sheet.

Create a new view assigned to the Existing Phase.
Using Visibility/Graphics turn off all Model categories except Rooms.
Now your view only shows rooms and room tags.

On the sheet that displays the demolition work, overlay this special room/room tag only view above the demolition view. A little bit of extra work but you get automatic display of the correct room information without resorting to "dumb" text and introducing possible errors.

As an aside, I believe that rooms should behave more like other model elements and have a "Phase Created" and "Phase Demolished" parameter. This way an unaffected room can persist across phases. Rooms whose boundaries are demolished should also be demolished and require the creation of a new room. In this way a demolished room would still be visible and New rooms would not according to the view's Phase Filter setting. I'm sure there may be some programmatic conundrums that this might introduce but overall this is the sort of manner in which Rooms should behave...in my opinion.