We just picked up an AVP this weekend and have been testing. Love that BIMx is on this so early though I'll echo most of the thoughts from the rest of the folks here. In a world where we're meeting more and more clients at their homes vs bringing them in to our office having a VR experience that I can take with me without bringing a big rig and doing a lot of setup is great. The majority of my notes below come from the fact this is clearly the iOS app ported over and some of the behavior that made sense in iOS is working against the app on VisionOS.
My number one complaint/thought, I think the decision to use the old google cardboard implementation of VR was a mistake, not only does it break from the standard UX of VisionOS, it also feels pretty stone age vs any other VR "walkthrough". Our entire firm agreed we'd prefer a room scale option (aka we can physically walk around in meat space) that has some sort of teleport command. This would be in keeping with what you see with VR in twinmotion and virtually any gaming system, Meta Quest, etc, not only that it's also the very first thing most folks do when experiencing a model in VR anyway. Allow folks to physically move and you'll get around some of the dizziness for most folks vs what is happening with the current roller coaster effect.
The low resolution is a challenge. I get that you all are going for a universal app and there's subsequent load to create a special high res model for VisionOS but it's extremely noticeable on that headset. Regardless of how it gets there the end goal for us would be something that is on the same level of "crisp" as what you see when opening a 3D file (usdz) natively on that device. It difficult to send clients vids and panoramas rendered from Twinmotion or similar and then have them open the BIMx app after as it feels like a step backward despite the immersion.
Eye height should be coming from device to floor height not an app setting. That not being accurate to each users eye breaks some of the value in VR which allows folks to make informed decisions on the heights of counters, ceilings, etc. This is as important as fixing the system for movement.
I concur that an AR option would be great. We were very impressed with the Revolve app which is a static 1:1 scale model of MEP that you can walk around. Opening a specific 3D view (for example: just the framing) and overlaying over the actual construction on-site is the holy grail for us that moves this on from neat gizmo.
We also tested an app called CADplan that had a lovely little dollhouse system which might be of interest to some clients. At the moment we're converting ArchiCAD files to .fbx and then using Reality Converter to make them .USDZ files to natively open on the AVP. This gets us that dollhouse or scale model effect but quicklook in vision OS isn't really setup to manipulate those items like an app could.
One consistent bug: Clicking "x" in immersive mode just removes the x it does not drop back to the menu of drawings, etc.
Happy to share more thoughts with the dev team as needed, we're going to be pushing this device through its paces over the next few weeks.
Feel free to DM me or reach out via lanewilliams.com
We're looking forward to seeing the progress on this front!
Principal/Owner // Lane Williams Architects
