Product Features

Spatial Sketching in VR with the Mass Tool

The Mass Tool, designed for spatial sketching, enables rapid prototyping of 3D concepts in VR for you and your team to ideate together, from anywhere.
Mischa Winkler
February 15, 2019
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3
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Massit, The Wild’s spatial sketching tool, enables rapid prototyping of 3D concepts and provides a way to quickly ideate and share ideas with your team.

You're working on a design in a 3D application like SketchUp or Revit, but you want to get a better sense of scale and experience what the space will feel like. In The Wild, you can immerse yourself and your team in your design — which is a “wow” on its own — but what if you want to ideate and prototype new ideas?

You may want to try different layouts in that space, like adjusting the ceiling height or visualizing what a certain room or desk configuration looks like. You’ll need some way to dimensionally sketch out your ideas. That’s where Massit comes into your workflow.

Create, Evaluate, and Iterate

Massit is our spatial sketching tool, designed for simplicity and speed. It enables rapid prototyping of a spatial concept and provides a tool with which you and your team can create, evaluate, and iterate on your ideas. Massit makes it possible for your team to do these things together and immediately experience how those changes feel.

When you are accessing The Wild from a VR headset*, select the tools icon on your controller and grab Massit. This prototyping tool was built for virtual reality and allows you to use your hands (via controllers) to gesturally define architectural elements in a shared workspace.

*We support HTC Vive, Samsung Mixed Reality, the Oculus Quest, and the Oculus Rift.

The Box

At the core of Massit is the box. You can define your box’s length, width, and depth with a single, two-handed gesture. The vast majority of architectural elements can be described by this very elemental form. Just look around, there are boxes all around you—the box is the basic building block of the built environment. We believe that design can be reduced to essential elements, where detail of form can be etched from that base. That is what Massit is best at: creating a base.

Simple on the Surface

Massit can be used to rapidly create elements such as floors, ceilings, walls, tables, and more. Though Massit might seem like a simple tool on the surface, there are some additional capabilities that allow you to create arrays, align masses along the major axis, display exact dimensions, and edit masses after you’ve created them.

From 2D to 3D

A big part of what makes The Wild revolutionary is the ability to be immersed in your design, not just visually, but by physically interacting with the environment. Rather than flattening your spatial design onto a screen and manipulating 3D space with a mouse and keyboard, in The Wild, you can naturally grab, place, and manipulate your content within your space.

Sketch Collaboratively

Everything you do in The Wild can be done collaboratively in real time, with multiple people joining from anywhere in the world. So not only can people see what you’re sketching with Massit, but you can also hand each other models, edit masses simultaneously, or even create one mass with the controllers of two different users.

The power of this simple tool becomes apparent when multiple people are at different scales in a space. Your colleague can literally build a floor, walls, and a ceiling around you in seconds, and you can immediately get a sense of what it will feel like to be in that place once it is built.

Have you created something with Massit that you want to re-use? You can use the Group tool to group together anything you want to save as a single asset and drag the asset into your library so you can access it from anywhere.

Take your design reviews to the next level by using Massit to prototype and facilitate your conversation and decision-making. Want to test it out for yourself? Visit thewild.com to get started.

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