Lauri Lemmenlehti
Plehat Oy
Lauri Lemmenlehti is a Landscape Architect and CEO of Plehat Oy, a digital landscape architecture office, based in Helsinki, Finland. He has researched extensively on the creation of landscapes in open world video games and has been teaching the integration of VR-technologies into landscape planning at Aalto University's department of Architecture.
Mikko Vekkeli is a Landscape Architect and Landscape BIM specialist. He is the CFO of Plehat Oy, a digital landscape architecture office, based in Helsinki, Finland.
Creating a temporal and dynamic landscape
The new digital tools provide especially for landscape architects and other environmental planners powerful tools, as they provide a way to present the natural environment in a temporal and dynamic way.
In architecture, the software-tools are used to plan and design different scales of objects: houses, buildings or furniture, and then communicate those plans to the actual builders. Even though the plans can change within the project, the drawings or building information models are the set goals of the project. In landscape architecture, as the project is built, it is only a start for a decades or even centuries long process.
As landscape architecture is mostly a process-oriented endeavor, due to the lifecycle-transformations of plant life and climatic changes of the environment, the software-tools that would suit the profession, should be also built from that perspective of needs.
The recent developments in virtual reality technology gives unseen possibilities for planners to jump into their plans and manipulate space and time.
Game-engine technology provides graphically powerful tools and a framework for integrating temporal, aural and climatical data into the environment model. Game engines can also create as real-time renderers the realistic and dynamic sceneries in a completely different graphical level than BIM-softwares.
We are currently building, with the help of Kiradigi-funding, a temporal and dynamic landscape virtual reality time machine, that tells the story of the development of the landscape of a group of Islands situated in front of southern Helsinki. We are using a mix of BIM, game-engine tech and advanced plant-life models, to create a multi-user VR-experience that lets you jump from day to night, days to months, from years to decades within the model. We are creating a proof of concept for landscape architects and environmental planners to understand, what kind of new possibilities this relatively cheap technology can create already now.
We are expecting the future of environmental planning to develop in very rapid steps within the next ten years, as game engine-based technology combined with rapidly evolving VR-goggles, provides easy and cheap ways to try and simulate different kinds of planning-options and also work as a very understandable medium for decision makers and stakeholders.
As virtual reality experiences reach into the field of architecture, demanded by the customers, the presented virtual landscape will rise into a more important role than before. People always look out of the window and the landscape has to be provided in a realistic manner. People will eventually want to see the landscape in different seasons of the year.
We also expect for the general quality of built environment to grow as the possibilities can be presented easily and the presentation of plans will be democratized out of professional-grade drawings into a realistic, understandable and conceptually accessible 3D-world. For architecture VR offers a very compelling way to visualize plans, for landscape architecture it has the possibility to revolutionize the whole field.
