Virtual and Augmented Reality: A New Era in the AEC World
Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Are The Latest Construction Technology
Virtual reality and Augmented Reality is being embraced at an astonishing speed within the AEC industry and its client alike, it is thoroughly raising the experience of how the buildings are envisioned before they are constructed.
Since technology seems to be boosting in various arenas, Virtual Reality has captured the fantasy of creative professionals seeking more distant experience for design and creation. Unfortunately, those visions were adhered with some limitations like expensive technology, stressed workflow, cumbersome interfaces and naive internet keeping a lid on any business zealot to embrace Virtual Reality far too long.
With the onset of newer technologies, Virtual Reality and its cousin, Augmented Reality (AR) again came in hype triggered with omnipresent Internet, Wi-Fi, mobile/wearable devices with the stronger USP’s had caught the eye of big giants in the computing media as well as of AEC industry.
We have gathered enormous amounts of Virtual Reality-ready content with Building Information Models (BIM) shore up by extensive industry ecosystem of BIM tools, processes and its culture.
Certainly, Virtual reality technology can anticipate as a natural purview, or you can say, the evolution of BIM with the immersing designers, creators and their users into an environment as the ultimate medium for transmitting a concept as a spatial experience. While BIM can symbolize the characteristics of space, Virtual Reality can convey the experience of a place. The uses for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will likely not to be evenly distributed across design and construction phases. VR is considered to be a tool better suited to the architects, while Augmented Reality will find more useful in the construction sector.
Let’s have a close look of the uses cases for Virtual Reality in the AEC industry:
-Virtual Reality helps in differentiating you from your competition today and can assist you in enhancing your business development efforts.
-Virtual Reality is a quintessential visualization tool, supporting design review, consultation and task sharing among all the stakeholders.
-Virtual Reality is also a cornerstone to promote education and remote training scenarios. Using this, architects can potentially develop a new generation of construction documents.
-Along with this, Virtual Reality proves to be an interesting tool as there is no limit as to how AEC professionals could entertain their clientele with new, futuristic experiences.
Unlike Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality boosts the experience of the real world by blending the contextual information when needed. Augmented Reality will be more unified into our everyday lives than VR and allows many opportunities in construction and facilities maintenance. The ace of augmented reality lies at the intersection of the realm of information.
-Architects design by imagining and developing their design in the context of ‘as-is,’ real-world circumstances allowing architects to design with augmented reality, overlaying BIM data onto real-world context for design visualization and collaboration.
-augmented reality for contractors, who will superimpose BIM over an ‘as-built’ project site to support the layout.
-Ultimately augmented reality for the owners, who overlay the ‘as-built’ BIM information with the ‘as-is’ real facility exposing the hidden conditions.
Further, AR can be connected to the Internet of things (IoT) to provide the real-time status of building assets.
What do you think will Virtual reality last, though it is back with promising changes? Well, this time may be for the B2B and professional users, but not for the consumers, I think. The tools are better, the processes and the workflows are in the perfect place, and popular culture has never seemed so apt in accepting the wearing computing technologies.
According to the industry professionals’ point of view specializing in design and construction and operations of a physical, spatial environment, we are individually suited to master this new(ish) virtual, spatial arena. Did you get started with this latest construction technology? What are you waiting for? VR and AEC go together like hand-in-Data-Gage, what say?
