It’s 2029 and despite thinking winter would never end, it has. As the weather warms, the ground thaws. You are finally going to turn that moonscape of a side yard into something appealing.
You know you want a garden…but that’s about all you know. You turn to your trusty, unassuming AR glasses to help you decide on a shape and what to fill it with.
With glasses on, you are presented with an auto generated moodboard of sorts. Something catches your eye – the body of an acoustic guitar. You have zero aptitude for playing an instrument, but you can appreciate the smooth curves and beautiful design. The glasses scale and virtually project the instrument flat against the side yard; the shape compliments your house lines perfectly.
Leveraging AI, your glasses queue up several garden layouts based on its understanding of your tastes. Not only can you see how the plants, flowers, and shrubs will look when fully mature, an animation shows how they will look as seedlings, and every growing season in between.
One specific design catches your attention as you involuntarily mouth, “wow!”. You take a couple laps up and down the length of the garden. There are many beautiful sightlines throughout. With that approval, you make a single hand gesture and your order is placed at Tonkadale Greenhouse; ready for pickup in an hour.
Once home, you don your AR glasses, grab a shovel and trace the outline of the guitar body in the dirt. Your garden border is set. You place your tree, shrubs, and flowers exactly where you see them in your AR overlay. A weekend of digging, planting, and cleaning up later, you now have a garden that brings you joy year after year.
Welcome back to 2020 – For most of us everyday folk, deciding on the details of home projects is a pain in the ass; often leading to arguments and eventual buyer’s remorse. Then, the effort of doing work we aren’t experts at becomes a masterclass in testing our patience and pain tolerance.
Let’s see if AR can help. I will be using the latest in AR to aid in both design and execution of a new garden. For this project, I am using Microsoft HoloLens 2 AR glasses. They are bulky and expensive, but they are the best performing glasses you can buy today. The software I’m using is a little home cooked meal I threw together for this project.
The only thing we know coming in is that we don’t want a straight line garden. As luck would have it, I have been using 3D models of musical instruments for a different project and think the sultry curves of a string instrument can be the perfect shape for our garden.
In honor of the Lindsey Stirling dubstep mix playing on Spotify, I overlay a violin in place. Close, but the curvature is just too dramatic and doesn’t quite line up with our home shape. Next up guitars. Ah yes, the simple shape of a classic acoustic guitar body feels just right.
With the shape decided on, I use my hands to pinch-and-zoom the model to get the scale right. I twist and turn it until it perfectly begins and ends the garden with the most pronounced curves.
To assist with visualization in the next step, I flatten the guitar model. I’ve found whenever using 3D models as a template or stencil, it helps to remove the depth. With that done, I grab my shovel and simply trace the outline of the guitar. Viola! It comes out perfect. No complex markings or math needed.
With the garden border set, I rough out plant layout ideas. Admittedly, in 2020, finding 3D models for your specific needs is a chore at best. Today’s AR glasses struggle to handle 3D models that aren’t computationally light. Model formats, pricing, and getting them to be usable will add great complexity, too. The day will come when these variables are irrelevant. That day is not today, thus I’m using simple spheres and boxes to represent the plants and their rough mature size.
With spheres and cubes in hand (hmm…literally, I guess), I move them around at random. I’m hoping some combination works, as if I’m trying to unlock a bike that doesn’t yet belong to me. The results are meh.
With a more methodical approach, I explore different groupings and alignments; some in parallel to the garden border, some in contrast. A bit of trail-and-error later, I find a mix of spaces and plants that sparks visual interest. I walk up and down the garden looking from many angles. This is the one. I move the real plants to match where they are in my digital design.
As an added benefit, the digital layout can save you rework. Laying down the landscaping fabric required moving all the plants out of the way. This doesn’t change the digital layout, so it is easy to put the glasses back on and get the plants right back to where they need to be.
Fast forwarding through the physical labor parts and the garden is complete. It comes out far better than we ever imagined!
AR did two key things for my project:
Once you see designs in 3D, it is hard to ever go back to Photoshop’ed mockups. In 3D space, you can move around and see how well your idea visually fits from infinite perspectives. You also get to physically audition the space – walking it and deciding if it feels too big, has too many bland spots, is too hard to get to each plant to water them, etc.
Making adjustments in the design is a breeze. Moving, adding, taking away models is a few hand motions aways.
Despite current limitations and needed simplification of 3D models, using AR works. It’s also not hard to make connections of how this AR concept can apply to many other uses:
New flooring of a hotel? The designer will see how different tile patterns look. The installer will use digital templates to guide laying the tile precisely to pattern.
New local coffee shop? The designer will walk the space to determine the perfect flow of foot traffic; then design around it. The builders will use 3D plans to ensure accuracy of that intent.
Want to make a garden but have no design chops? A designer halfway around the world can curate layouts in real-time. They see what you see through your AR glasses and generate ideas on the fly. When one floats your boat, you buy the plants, and use AR to execute that design.
The takeaway – We love our garden. Using AR, we were able to elevate our skills to go beyond a traditional rectangle layout and symmetrical design to create something bold and uniquely ours. AR supercharged both our thinking and doing.
As cost, size, and comfort of glasses significantly improve, more uses will become feasible. In time, AR will become a mainstay in our everyday lives.
If anything about this project piqued your interest, reach out. I know you have ideas and thoughts and I’d love to hear them or help you build them!
Cheers,
Anthony
In the years to come, AR glasses will have a profound effect on how we work, play, and get things done. Let’s not talk hypotheticals. Let’s craft the vision, roll up our sleeves, and build that reality!