HOWARD HUGHES WARD VILLAGE SALES CENTER

Interactive Architecture Viewer

2021 - 2023 | AV&C

HOWARD HUGHES WARD VILLAGE is a series of sales center in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. I developed a semi-pernament interactive 3D model viewer system which provides the highlights and sliced view of each unit of various buildings with elegant flying camera, controlled by iPad and web app. Binyan, an architecture firm has produced the digital model and AV&C developed the system.

Tools Used

Unreal Engine 4.26
TouchDesigner
OWL Live Streaming Toolkit
OSC
WebSocket

The building, once an IBM building in the past, now serves as the sales gallery for Ward Village in Hawaii. Within this historically significant building, three distinct sales galleries have been established. Agents and buyers can freely explore three different versions of digital buildings (The Park, Kalae, The Launiu) through iPads on all 4K screens within the premises.

The new digital model viewer, based on Unreal and integrated into our existing TouchDesigner framework, presented a significant challenge in developing a stable 4K interactive system capable of running both TouchDesigner and Unreal seamlessly on the same machine. After numerous trials and errors, I successfully constructed the new framework, ensuring a constant 60FPS without any crashes in both TD and Unreal.

One notable limitation was the precise control of Unreal's flying camera. To overcome this, we meticulously programmed every camera path in TouchDesigner and transmitted the position, rotation, and FOV data via OSC. Additionally, we utilized the OWLLiveStreamingToolkit plugin to send 2D image and video textures, enabling the seamless transfer of 4K image textures from TouchDesigner to Unreal. The final render was outputted to the second screen using nDisplay, contributing to a polished and professional presentation.

First, I created the capability to freely set angles for a total of eight cameras, including east, west, north, south, higher, lower orbit, and both higher and lower perspectives. Following that, I designed and developed the overall 3D Model Viewer to seamlessly connect. This was achieved by ensuring that the ending point of the Intro Drone Footage video aligns with the starting point of the Unreal Engine camera. The result is a cohesive and uninterrupted experience for the entire 3D Model Viewer.

I engineered a tool to streamline the debugging process for highlight and cutaway modes across hundreds of apartment units. This tool significantly reduced the time spent on color and functionality testing, expediting the overall development cycle.