November 21, 2024
INTRO
It’s the age of the megaproject: AEC professionals must design and build increasingly complex structures and they must do so on time, within budget, and with minimal waste. All this amid growing infrastructure and housing needs, rising material costs, a labor shortage, and a climate crisis—no big.
I sound like a broken record, but AR/VR/MR (XR) can help. In this post, we’ll cover how extended reality can be used in all phases of a construction or engineering project by pretty much every stakeholder.
WHY XR?
AEC CHALLENGES
Fragmentation
The fragmented nature of AEC projects is the source of many of the industry’s problems. Every project involves multiple parties and a remote worksite that’s constantly changing as building progresses.
In the design phase, a typical building project might involve an architect, different engineers and specialty designers, with contributions from various consultants, suppliers, etc. and of course the client or owner. At the building site, you have teams of skilled workers (carpenters, electricians, etc.) and their managers, though never all present at the same time. As you can imagine, coordination and communication are challenging.
3D to 2D to 3D
2D conversion further complicates matters, leading to issues that often only become apparent in the field. From a 3D vision in someone’s mind, a building or infrastructure concept is translated into many static renderings (2D drawings as well as 3D models on a flat screen) to be shared with stakeholders, and then interpreted again in real 3D space by construction crews.
The process is far from foolproof even with visualization tech like CAD and small-scale physical models, leaving plenty of room for misinterpretation and unanticipated design flaws that cost dearly in the form of rework, waste, and customer dissatisfaction.
The essential challenge is how to effectively simulate form and space in order to understand spatial relationships and convey not only how a building will look but how it will be used and experienced.
OLD SCHOOL WAYS
You’ve probably heard that AEC is one of the least digitized and least productive industries.
Projects that finish over budget and behind schedule are the norm. Extra time and costs are now built into most proposals. It’s as if the industry has resigned itself to this, accepting that it won’t ever overcome the complexities and inefficiencies of traditional methods–but it doesn’t have to be this way.
When it comes to XR, AEC actually has somewhat of a head start thanks to widespread adoption of 3D visualization tech like BIM and CAD, advancements in adjacent tech like SLAM and photogrammetry, and the availability of headsets geared towards heavy industry (some even ANSI certified and compatible with PPE).
DESIGN SUPPORT & REVIEW
The value proposition of XR for AEC lies in helping to get all stakeholders on the same page, all visualizing the same design throughout the project lifecycle, starting in the design phase.
VR, in particular, enables designers to inhabit their designs and iterate faster. They can quickly test out different design concepts, walk in, through and around a virtual model as it’s conceived, and better understand how every design decision will impact the final space.
XR offers greater freedom to innovate - necessary to designing more efficient, sustainable buildings - and a superior sense of real-world scale and proportion, leading to fewer errors and less rework. Moreover, it enables interdisciplinary design reviews in which every participant can interact with the same virtual model, identify issues, and visualize changes in real time.
COMMUNICATION & COORDINATION
It follows that XR can improve communication and collaboration among project stakeholders, making it easier for everyone involved - professional or layperson - to envision something that doesn’t yet exist, cross-reference designs to ensure things are buildable, and even coordinate construction details.
All stakeholders can essentially meet in one (virtual) place, so designers can more easily explain decisions and limitations to clients, architects and engineers can more effectively exchange ideas, and contractors and asset owners can plan for optimal use of materials and resources –all without traveling and before breaking ground.
Virtual walkthroughs, in particular, offer a superior way to present projects, understand the physical limitations of a space, simulate how people will move through a structure or how a design component will function, etc.
Once construction commences, a digital twin of the building and/or jobsite would allow all stakeholders to monitor progress in real time and stay in the loop on what’s happening in the field while reducing the number of onsite visits.
CONSTRUCTION SUPPORT
In the building phase, XR - especially augmented and mixed reality - can be used to view plans and schematics on top of real-world structures, provide step-by-step installation instructions, document and validate work, and even “see through” walls to reveal internal wires, pipes, etc.
Instead of looking down at paper drawings and tablet screens, XR gives crews the ability to take 3D models onto the construction site for hands-free guidance, empowering them to work safer and faster. Workers can view those models and other useful information as digital overlays in real physical space, making it easier to build to specifications, quickly spot anomalies, and avoid rework.
Imagine a full-scale, interactive digital twin of the built environment incorporating not only design plans but also construction schedules, equipment availability, building codes, real-time building progress, etc. It shows one worker the location of every hole he needs to drill and ensures proper placement, enables a safety manager to remotely inspect a finished area of the building from a back office, and helps determine where the next day’s supply deliveries should go. It could even help train future operators of the building.
That brings us to post-build XR applications.
OPERATOR SUPPORT & LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
An immersive digital twin of a building or bridge is essentially a living 4D model of that structure that holds all of its information and evolves in real time, communicating with its real-world physical counterpart using IoT, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies throughout its lifecycle.
Created at the initial stage of a project and initially used by AEC teams, the digital replica of a building is then handed over to the project owner to serve as a powerful facility management tool. The twin continues to collect operational, systems, environmental, user, and other data and can be used for simulation, monitoring, training, and ultimately to support decommissioning efforts.
Some AEC firms are now including digital twins in project RFPs as an extra service. Clients use them for monitoring, predictive maintenance, sustainability, etc.; while AEC professionals gain access to ongoing insight to design and build better in the future.
CONCLUSION
AEC giants like AECOM, Arcadis, Balfour Beatty, and Jacobs are already using XR for all of the above use cases: Design visualization, remote support and collaboration, planning, training, and safety; and they’re reporting impressive results like rework reduced to as little as 1% and as much as 20% in cost savings.
Starting at the beginning in the design phase, the benefits of XR trickle down to the jobsite and extend over a building’s lifetime. In an industry begging for disruption, can AEC professionals afford to continue to ignore the proven capabilities offered by both extended reality and digital twins?
