Pixels to places: Building immersive futures in AEC with Foster & Partners

Explore how Foster + Partners is reinventing architectural design and client collaboration with immersive technologies. Zehao Qin, Associate Partner and Design Systems Analyst, shares how the Applied R&D team is building a unified XR ecosystem that lets architects, designers, and clients step inside buildings and cities long before they’re built.

Discover how Foster + Partners and Unity are connecting complex design tools, diverse teams, and multiple XR devices through a single real-time 3D pipeline - from pixels to places.

Watch the full video to learn how:

- Foster + Partners’ applied R&D team supports 2,500+ staff with in-house expertise spanning architecture, computation, data science, and XR.

- Early experiments with CAVEs, tethered VR, and drone-captured views led to a scalable, cloud-based immersive ecosystem instead of one-off demos.

- The Glaucon platform and Unity-powered workflows enable “one single codebase” to deploy to Vision Pro, iOS, Magic Leap 2, Meta Quest, Pico, desktop, and WebGL.

- Seamless pipelines let designers create shared virtual mockups with a single click, so teams and clients can walk buildings, cities, and products at true scale.

- High-fidelity XR visualization bring real-world projects to life.

- Foster + Partners is shaping the future of immersive architecture with higher visual fidelity, massive-model pipelines, and Gaussian Splatting.

This session was recorded at the Unite Industry Summit in Barcelona, November, 2025.