ARchitecture

Overview

As part of a 3D modelling course and the accompanying Interactive Visualization project class, I worked on a collaborative project at the intersection of architecture, augmented reality, and mobile rendering. The project class was organized in collaboration with the chair of architecture and focused on the interactive presentation of architectural content.

In the modeling course, the final task was to design and create an object in De Stijl style. For this submission, I designed and modeled a modern De Stijl lighthouse in 3ds Max.

The project class itself required us to collaborate with architecture students on an application for architectural visualization. Our team developed ARchitecture, an augmented reality application built with Unity AR Foundation for both iOS and Android. The central idea was to work with IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) data, a common BIM (Building Information Modeling) format, and make architectural information such as materials, dimensions, and structural properties accessible through a standard AR-capable smartphone rather than specialized software or hardware.

The application was developed over several months by a team of two programmers and one architecture student:

BIM Data

A key requirement for the project was an effective workflow for handling IFC data. We used Tridify to convert IFC files into a form that could be processed in Unity. This made BIM attributes available as components on the corresponding game objects, which allowed us to query and display selected information directly in the application.

While the full set of available BIM information was broader than what we exposed in the interface, the application was designed to surface the most relevant customer-facing attributes through a simple touch-based interaction model. We also used Tridify’s material replacement workflow together with custom materials to improve the visual quality of a complex school model consisting of several thousand objects and hundreds of thousands of polygons.

Additional BIM-driven features included an explosion mode, which dynamically separates walls into their structural components, and storey-based filtering, which allows the user to inspect only selected floors of the building. These features made it easier to explore room layouts, material composition, and the internal structure of the model.

Overall, the application offered a more interactive and flexible way of presenting architectural information than traditional physical mockups or static visualizations.

AR Foundation & AR Features

To support both iOS and Android while maintaining a shared feature set, we used Unity AR Foundation as a common abstraction layer over ARKit and ARCore.

The application incorporated several AR-specific features, including lighting estimation, sensor-based movement tracking, anchor-based placement, and QR code detection. QR-based positioning was used to align the digital building model with a physical miniature area model built from cardboard and wood. We also rendered the physical base model into the AR scene for occlusion and shadow casting, which significantly improved the perceived realism of the result.

In addition to marker-based placement, the building could also be placed manually on any detected horizontal surface. Surface detection was visualized using a shader, and the model could be scaled up to room size, allowing users to inspect the architecture more closely and move through the space in a more immersive way.

Rendering

To achieve a visually convincing result while remaining feasible on modern mobile devices, we used Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline. The building model followed a physically based rendering workflow, and the application performed well on recent smartphones and tablets even without extensive optimization.

A major part of the rendering work involved integrating the virtual building convincingly into the camera image. To support realistic compositing, we implemented several custom rendering and masking steps so that the model would be occluded correctly and cast shadows onto real-world surfaces. The rendering pipeline was therefore customized beyond the default URP setup and could be optimized further for broader device support.

Additional rendering features included a subtle outline effect for selected objects and a ghost mode for simplified architectural inspection. In ghost mode, the building is rendered semi-transparently with reduced lighting complexity, making it easier to inspect structure and spatial arrangement.

We also adjusted the main directional light according to the real-world sun position, allowing the model to respond more naturally to its physical environment. The user could further modify the time of day in the application in order to inspect the building under different lighting conditions, including nighttime scenes with interior lighting enabled.

Conclusion

ARchitecture was one of the strongest interdisciplinary projects I worked on during my studies. It combined mobile AR, architectural data processing, cross-platform development, and custom rendering into a practical visualization tool with a clear real-world use case.

After completion, we created an application trailer to present the implemented features and overall interaction flow. The captured footage was recorded on an iPad Pro, which provided enough performance for a high-fidelity and stable demonstration. Android builds are available below, while the iOS version is not distributed directly. The source code is available on GitHub.

The project was also featured in the Tridify Academy program, where selected student projects are showcased as examples of practical BIM and visualization workflows.