Virtual Reality and the future of construction

Introduction: Despite the recent trends in technology, construction projects are becoming increasingly challenging, which, in the result, brings in more complex and dynamic construction environments. In fact, traditional management and monitoring methods are currently unable to keep up with the industry’s quick development, leading to several problems in task efficiency and transfer of information between stakeholders. As a result, the Architecture Engineering Construction and Operations (AECO) sector is making use of the digitalization in order to improve project management, assist trade-crews and achieve a more proficient working environment. The adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) embodies a paradigm shift from the traditional approaches towards a collaborative and integrated working process. Though BIM is improving the aforesaid issues, not every construction entity can easily adapt and use it successfully. Therefore, supportive tools to assist BIM in achieving its full potential are in high demand. Objectives: The current research objective is to provide a review of previous works in the field of BIM-based Virtual Reality (VR), in order to establish a clear view of this research field. This work provides the primary data on such goals. Methodology: In order to conduct the research, the PRISMA Statement strategy was used. The selected primary keywords were “construction”, “virtual reality” and “building information modelling“ and their variants. The research was carried out in the main engineering databases and journals, being Scopus, Science Direct and IEEE Xplore some examples. Results: After the identification of 2,950 records, exclusion criteria were applied: year of publication, type of document, type of source and de-duplication. The titles and abstracts of the publications were screened in order to determine the scope of the papers, leaving for full-text analysis just 75 studies. After going through the eligibility criteria, only 14 papers remained. Using the snowballing technique, two more papers were added to the study, resulting in 16 included papers. Most of the papers focused on the Construction Design, Construction Management, and Construction Safety fields, being “design” the most occurring construction stage. The highlighted target groups for the VR interfaces were Engineers, Architects and Workers. Most system architectures comprise, at least, three layers regarding a BIM software tool, a visual enhancement module and a game engine to provide the virtual environment and interaction functionalities. However, some studies referred to a fourth layer (database). Conclusions: The BIM-VR relation addressed in the articles was mainly focused on the model’s geometric information since BIM provides an accurate display of building geometry. Most VR interfaces do not possess a database component to provide access to BIM parametric information, leading to the conclusion that BIM is not achieving its full potential with VR tools.