Introducing XR Hub team: Green Pixel
During summer 2020, we will be posting introduction articles about our XR Hub teams on a weekly basis. These articles are based on interview questions, answered by the teams themselves. This is your chance to get to know our talented community, team by team!
Now it’s time to introduce to you the newest addition to the XR Hub, Green Pixel!
Green Pixel 
Programmer and natural environment specialist Henna Fabritius and landscape architect Mikko Vekkeli from Green Pixel.
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What does your team do, or aim to do?
“We are solving the problem of representing the natural environment elements and natural processes in city planning and urban design projects.”
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What is the idea or the “mission” behind your team?
“We are aiming to be the place you look into when you need digital environment elements for your planning project.”
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Tell us a little bit about your team members!
“At the moment there are two of us in the office, Mikko Vekkeli and Henna Fabritius
Mikko is responsible for finding different ways to utilize the digital resources we are building up in different planning and design processes. Mikko is a landscape architect and is also actively involved in many landscape design projects. Mikko is testing the products and methods we are creating on the way and spreading the word of our vision around planning and design instances.
Henna is our programmer and natural environment specialist who has remarkable experience in both of these disciplines. She is responsible for ecological and technical performance of our products. With Henna we are able to explore and implement interesting and meaningful ecological data to our process.”
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What project(s) are you currently working on?
“We are creating an algorithmic plant library for city planning and urban design purposes to use with BIM and different city information models. The individual models are created so that they are memory efficient but recognizable so the models can be used in XR experiences also.
We are working on multiple landscape design projects in which all we use digital models and VR experience of the site, it’s structures and surrounding vegetation to help the communication over the participants.
In these projects we are constantly trying to find new ways to optimize the gathering of the data from the site to create the models more efficiently, and to visualize design elements and vegetation in the models and in XR environments more interesting and more meaningful manner.”
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Why did you decide to join Helsinki XR Center’s XR developer hub?
“We have had the XR Center in our minds since we started working with the XR development a few years ago. We have attended in many XR center hosted events over time, and build up a relation with some of the community members already.
Now that we had to relocate our office during the winter, joining XR center was our number one choice. Here we are able to test new ideas with available hardware and knowledge resources they have to offer, and possibly create collaborations on projects we don’t have resources by ourselves.”
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When did you join the XR Hub, and how long had your team existed before joining?
“We joined the hub at the end of April this year (2020).
With this team we have worked together since January 2020.”
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As a part of the XR Hub, how has your experience been so far?
“Well, we are really newcomers at the moment and I think this remote work – social distancing – corona time is not a best time to make assessments how things work around normally, but we have enjoyed our nice office space which suits our purposes well. Other teams seem nice and community hosts have made it us really easy to settle in.
We are really looking forward to see how we can evolve as a resident of the hub and how we can help others, and benefit from the community’s abundant resources.”
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What is the most interesting or exciting thing about ‘extended reality’?
“As a landscape architect, for me it is it’s ability to visualize really complex spatial combinations and temporal processes in one experience. These are hard to represent with other sorts of media.” 
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This post is a part of the article series about Helsinki XR Center’s hub teams. In this series, we will be posting team introductions on a weekly basis during the summer of 2020. Now it’s your chance to get to know our talented XR community!
Follow our social media channels and website’s News-section to stay posted for new articles!
If you missed the earlier XR Hub team introductions, they are available in the News-section.
