Mark Suster, VC partner at Upfront Capital, famously advised: “Don’t be afraid to pivot, but always be sure you know why you’re pivoting.”.
So, what drove this significant shift?
Let's rewind to early 2021 when our founders, Sebastian Witt and Robin Römer, embarked on cityscaper's journey, aiming to simplify the communication of complex 3D CAD planning data through Augmented Reality (AR).
By the end of 2023, cityscaper had secured nearly €500,000 in research funding and completed over 30 customer projects. Urban planners, project developers, and architects across various German cities relied on cityscaper to convey their complex 3D CAD data using AR.
However, limitations surfaced with cityscapers' AR applications:
1. AR fails to address a tangible problem - AR only improves the understanding of a 3D CAD plan, but this is not measurable
2. In architectural planning, revealing every detail with AR in the early planning stages isn’t ideal, as important decisions still need to be made
However, our continued market research and the many customer projects paid off differently. Together with our 3rd co-founder, Yannic Schwarz, we realized:
Creating simple 2D visuals out of 3D CAD plans is incredibly tedious.
Most architects invest more than 8 hours to create architectural visualizations or spend on average 1.500€ to outsource them.
Addressing this challenge is crucial, as architects, particularly in the early planning stages and competitions, lack the time to visualize weeks' worth of CAD plans. This often leads to exhaustive night shifts and cumbersome manual feedback loops with 3D renderers.
Thus, combining our market insights with expertise in AI, 3D rendering, and cloud computing, our team now embarks on the journey to develop an AI architecture visualization platform. We enable architects to effortlessly transform every 3D CAD model into stunning visualizations within minutes.
Over the past two years, our development team established a pipeline to host 3D CAD and BIM planning data on the cloud, setting us apart from other AI architecture visualization tools such as ArkoAI, Visoid, SketchUp Diffusion, and ArchicadAI that only use 2D data as input.
Leveraging 3D cloud models, Pelicad's platform feeds 3D metadata to generative networks, minimizing AI errors and ensuring that the AI architecture visualizations accurately reflect the original plans. Also, architects can change materials, add 3D context, and have full control over the AI’s output.
For more details and to join the waitlist for our beta version, feel free to check out our website.
As for cityscapers' AR solutions, rest assured: next to AI architecture visualizations, we will continue supporting delivered AR projects. Furthermore, with our alpha solution aimed for release in Q2 this year, users can seamlessly convert 3D CAD planning data into AR models, either experiencing them via our legacy cityscaper App or publishing them as WebAR models after texture adjustments and proper placement.
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