Abstract
Research and applications related to Virtual Reality (VR) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry are steadily increasing, being considered as one of the current trends in digital innovation. A convergence is currently on-going between Building Information Modelling (BIM), VR implementation and the soft landings principles, which highlight the need for a smooth transition from design to operation through the early involvement of clients and end-users. In particular, immersive virtual environments could allow stakeholders to experience the full-scale representation of a virtual facility prototype in an intuitive and engaging manner through immersion and sense of presence, promoting feedback collection during usability-focused design review meetings. On the other hand, despite the renewed interest in immersive VR, both technological and procedural challenges to its effective implementation still exist. The latter are within the scope of this study, which aims to address them in a systematic way as a comprehensive guideline for clients and design teams. This study describes the development of a VR-aided usability-focused design review session protocol for implementing immersive VR when clients and end-users are involved in design review meetings. It is the result of an inductive approach associated with qualitative research methods for data collection and data analysis. A case study has been selected as a main research method for facing the first step into the research problem. A further iteration of data collection and analysis was adopted to guarantee the validity of the research, including talks with experts and literature comparison. Finally, the session protocol has been developed in the form of a process map representing all the necessary phases and activities to consider for the effective adoption of immersive VR to evaluate design intents with clients and end-users. As a comprehensive summary, the session protocol fills a gap in the research on the adoption of virtual reality in the AEC industry, which was lacking a prescriptive and structured process to drive the effective use of this technology in collaborative meetings and decision-making processes.
Highlights
Research and applications related to Virtual Reality (VR) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry are steadily increasing in number and scopes
Within the multiple purposes and use cases VR systems could be applied for, the scope of this study has been narrowed down to the convergence that is currently on-going between Building Information Modelling (BIM), VR implementation and the soft landings principles, which highlight the need for a smooth transition from design to operation through the early involvement of clients and end-users (BS 8536-1:2015)
The VR-aided usability-focused design review session protocol that resulted from the validation process is represented in the form of a process map and it consists in a comprehensive summary of all the processes, phases and activities that have to be performed when immersive virtual reality systems are implemented in collaborative design review meetings with clients and end-users (Fig. 4)
Summary
Research and applications related to Virtual Reality (VR) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry are steadily increasing in number and scopes This growing and renewed interest in VR systems, which are currently considered as one of the trends of digital innovation (Mansouri and Akhavian, 2018), since previous research efforts dating from early 2000s, is closely linked to the everincreasing adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) processes, procedures and technologies that characterises the on-going digital transition of the industry (Mastrolembo Ventura et al, 2019). Immersive virtual environments allow stakeholders to experience the full-scale representation of a virtual facility prototype in an intuitive and engaging manner through immersion and sense of presence (Paes et al, 2017) Based on those characteristics, immersive VR could be classified as semi-immersive VR and fully-immersive VR.
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