Releasing Arkio 1.0

Today marks a big milestone in the development of Arkio.

We started working on Arkio in early 2017 and scrambled to show our first alpha release at Autodesk University in late 2017. We demoed Arkio live on stage at NXTBLD in London in June 2019 and kicked off the Arkio beta that has seen thousands of people all over the world trying Arkio and giving us amazing feedback.

Today we are releasing version 1.0.

Building a collaborative modeling tool for architecture that works on mobile VR headsets, desktops, tablets and phones is not an easy task to be honest. We decided early on to develop our own solid modeling kernel to be able to achieve the performance needed for real-time booleans and advanced geometry manipulation on mobile devices. This kernel also enables users to manipulate shapes inside VR as if they had physical properties, with shapes that snap, slide, glue and stack on top of each other.

Being able to create architecture with your bare hands in VR is a powerful experience and we believe that the future of architectural design will increasingly take place in immersive and intuitive design tools like Arkio. We have made sure that Arkio integrates seamlessly with existing design tools such as Revit, Rhino and SketchUp to make it easy for everyone to get started augmenting their current design workflow. In many ways Arkio is like an immersive and collaborative overlay on these tools, making designers more effective and helping them to work together and with their clients.

During the beta we have seen many creative uses of Arkio. We have seen urban planners create an entire neighborhood in less than two hours, students using Arkio to collaborate on class projects and architecture firms winning new project work by presenting their design proposals from inside Arkio. We have seen people with no prior 3D modeling experience design their entire house in VR in less than a day. We heard from a retired teacher of architecture how emotional it was for him to be able to sketch shapes effortlessly in VR, something he had been dreaming of for thirty years.

We know we are just getting started and that there are many things we need to improve in version 1.0 and beyond. This includes enabling users to add precise dimensions inside Arkio, the ability to create more complex geometry and making working with imported 3D models as seamless as possible. Our ambition is also to make Arkio even easier to use, so that anyone can start designing within minutes.

Arkio will be completely free until September 1, 2021. Starting in September we will offer three plans, including a free plan so everyone will be able to try out Arkio before deciding to upgrade to a paid plan. The goal with our paid plans is to make Arkio affordable as we believe this technology should be available to as many people as possible. You can check out the difference between Arkio Free, Pro and Enterprise on our pricing page.

To everyone that has been a part of the Arkio journey so far we want to say thank you. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without your feedback and input.

To those of you that are new to Arkio we want to say welcome and if you have time we would love hearing what you think in our forums, by email or on our social channels. If you haven’t installed Arkio yet you can find it here for all our different platforms.

We don’t know exactly where this journey will take us, but we know for sure it will be an exciting one!