TAFE Queensland and Arkio join forces

TAFE Queensland students at our Coomera Creative Campus anticipated a visit from the Netherlands Co-founder of Arkio, Johan Hanegraaf. TAFE Queensland has partnered with, Arkio, one of the most well-known virtual reality platforms and software’s for immersive and collaborative building design known by architects around the world.

Arkio Co-Founder, Johan Handegraaf joined TAFE Queensland students in person as he delivered a live demonstration of the latest virtual reality technology to the mix of realities using a pass-through feature of Arkio. The demonstration featured the latest VR Meta Quest Pro headset, released globally last month, to provide an insight to industry application and examples of the current use of this industry leading technology. 

TAFE Queensland, UC Digital Design Associate Lecturer, Ann Stevens said the training partnership with Arkio demonstrates its ability to provide Gold Coast students with access to the very latest virtual reality training.

“Arkio is a perfect and simple tool for teaching and learning virtual reality (VR), it is of the highest industry standard providing TAFE Queensland students with practical hands-on experience allowing them to develop the skills they need to be job-ready,” Mrs Stevens said.

“It allows teachers to engage learners from novice to expert VR users to design and collaborate in VR, and to interact with their 3D scanned models and immerse in their scanned environment without programming skills,” she said.

Johan Handegraaf, Co-Founder mentioned with Arkio, people can brainstorm, sketch, design, review, present and work together in real-time in a shared space using virtual reality headsets, desktops, tablets and phones. It allows users to be fully immersed in their designs through the power of VR where they can experience buildings at scale while shaping with their hands in a physical and intuitive way.

“Arkio is the first design tool made specifically for architectural design work inside VR.”

 “VR and augmented reality (AR) have the potential to be the ultimate creative medium for architecture and our goal is to give designers superpowers using this new medium.”

“During our beta (testing) we have seen a lot of different people use Arkio, including urban planners, architects, interior designers, landscape designers and even hobbyists.”

“Arkio makes it possible for the first time to sketch out buildings or entire urban plans while experiencing and adjusting design ideas at human scale.”

TAFE Queensland Diploma of Screen and Media and Virtual Reality short course participant Deserae Westwood was part of the first group of students at TAFE Queensland to use Arkio earlier this year. Participants experienced new and emerging technologies and had the opportunity to engage and interact with them.

“As a novice VR user, my favourite experience during the course was learning expertly and seamlessly from my teacher Ann, how to design and create an environment in Arkio using VR.”

“One of Arkio’s best features is the ability to join in on a collaborative group session, interact at the same time and design, create and produce a 3D world that looks and feels immersive and engaging.”

“Arkio has been a part of my life and my family’s life since Ann first introduced me to it - it’s amazing what we have created at TAFE Queensland using industry standard virtual reality.”

Learn more about a career in the creative industries: https://tafeqld.edu.au/courses/study-areas/creative-industries

Learn more about Arkio here: Arkio - Collaborative Spatial Design