Implementing virtual reality-based design review in the construction industry

Building Information Modeling (BIM)-enabled digitalization has been innovating the entire workflow and information management in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Emerging visualization technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) have extended BIM-based 3D visualization to an immersive and intuitive virtual prototyping experience. VR applications have shown their potential for making construction design review tasks more effective and collaborative, thus attracting growing research attention and efforts. However, despite the increasing technological capabilities, the adoption of VR applications has still been lagging in the AEC industry, leaving the theoretical potential unrealized. One major reason for the gap between the state-of-the-art and state-of-practice is the lack of validation on VR performance. Therefore, the first research question in this dissertation addressed this issue by measuring user performance when undertaking four design review tasks using VR-based or desktop-based devices. The experiment controlled more testbed-related variables, such as functions and navigation methods, than existing VR performance validation research to reveal the contribution exclusively from VR technology. Results show that VR users can detect significantly more design errors and commit significantly fewer mistakes in scheduling installation sequence when using VR as compared to desktop-based interactions. Experiments in the first research question revealed the lack of approaches to visualize occluded objects in 3D models. In order to facilitate a comprehensive design review, the second research question proposed a semi-automatic occlusion detection framework for building information models. It converts objects in a 3D model to point clouds and overlaps them with a virtual scan of the model to identify occlusion. A ready-to-implement VR application does not guarantee industry adoption because the development cost for VR can be demanding. The last part of this dissertation proposed a Generic Extended Reality (GenXR) model that supports all XR development in the AEC industry. The author compared BIM-to-XR durations in two case studies and six XR prototype development. The result shows that the GenXR model could save over 65% of model transfer time for XR development.