VR in Construction – Multi-User and Multi-Purpose

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The integration of immersive virtual reality (VR) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) has many applications within the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries, and it is mainly VR’s ability to convey scale and details that is put forward when comparing it to non-immersive visualizations. More recently, immersive VR has been extended to support multi-user sessions where several participants can experience the same model at the same time. However, there is currently a lack of real-world studies exploring multi-user VR in a construction-oriented context. In this paper we present and discuss our findings from evaluating a VR-system with multi-user capabilities at multiple occasions on several real-world construction projects. In all cases the VR visualization has been directly realized from the design teams IFC-models and the multi-user sessions has been performed both co-located as well as fully remote. Our results show that multi-user VR improves communication, understanding, and collaboration, and by letting staff with knowledge and experience from construction production review the project in VR, many design errors and constructability issues can be identified and resolved before reaching the actual production stage. Moreover, the use of VR is helpful regarding sequencing and planning, and to identify alternative design solutions. In addition to the evaluations and analysis, we present technical details of the developed VR-system.