Morpholio AR SketchWalk
Courtesy Morpholio / Drawing by Cluck Design Collaborative Morpholio AR SketchWalk

Mentally inserting oneself into a floor plan can come as second nature for architects, but the exercise can be a bit abstract for others. In the past, designers have employed physical models and even tape or rope on floors to help clients experience a space, understand scale, and envision adjacencies. Nowadays, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies can bridge the gap in spatial understanding sans the hours spent in the modeling lab or ripping up kinked-again tape. But VR and AR software can also be complex or inaccessible, as can be the headsets and gear with which to view VR and AR models.

With an assist from Apple’s ARKit 2 release, the seven-person team at New York–based designers and software developer Morpholio announced today the release of AR SketchWalk, a feature in its increasingly capable app Morpholio Trace (iOS 12, $19.99 per year for the requisite TracePro subscription). The new tool can create near-instantaneous AR experiences using any floor plan, sketch, or diagram created in a file format compatible with Trace, such as an imported PDF or a Trace-native drawing.

Morpholio co-founder Toru Hasegawa tells ARCHITECT that AR SketchWalk combines the floor plan’s simplicity and ease of iterating with the innate spatial understanding of the real world.