Effects of using virtual reality on AEC team collaboration

Construction projects require coordination of different disciplines, which makes knowledge management and information exchange crucial in design and construction teams. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a powerful technology for communication and information management but has limitations in terms of the ways project stakeholders interact with design visualizations. The current method of collaboration with BIM limits the participation of all team members since the 3D model is presented on a 2D shared screen while one person has the control over the viewpoint and can create markups. Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that provides an environment that enables each participant to have their individual point of view and markup tool while virtually collaborating with other team members in a simulated walkthrough of the project.  Designers and builders need to exchange disciplinary knowledge while they vet design alternatives during different phases of the project.   Project team members have in-depth knowledge in the area of their expertise, but they share a part of their knowledge understandable by other team members in explaining design ideas, disciplinary constraints, and technical analysis to collaborate, find solutions, and make decisions.  This phenomenon is referred to as Shared Understanding.  This dissertation studies the effects of VR’s immersive environment and markup tool capabilities on building Shared Understanding among AEC project team members in asynchronous and synchronous 3D coordination processes. The research study results show that VR’s immersive environment can provide a better understanding of the model to the users in comparison to BIM, and it can assist in understanding the design issues and system conflicts. Most of the participants in the asynchronous research study preferred VR over BIM to understand the technical annotations made by VR’s markup tool in the 360-degree environment while BIM provides markups on a 2D screenshot of the 3D model. They also found verbal communication in VR more effective than text in the BIM platform. The synchronous research study results show that teams spent less time in VR to build Shared Understanding of the team decision. The 3D coordination meeting duration in VR was significantly lower than the meeting duration where teams used BIM. Participants found VR’s markup tool capabilities and immersive environment as features missing in BIM that assisted in team collaboration and building Shared Understanding, however there were reported drawbacks in collaboration in VR. Team members could get disoriented in the 360-degree environment and the team leads were not always sure if all team members are following the markups in the environment.