Practical use of VR & AR in the Construction Industry.
The most obvious advantage of AR in construction is that it allows the developer to eliminate the roadblocks in a design decision-making process. For example if you’re from construction you should know that customers very often don’t talk the language that you speak. Two-dimensional construction documents don’t necessarily mean something to a business manager or a nurse. However immersing a person into virtual reality gives them a better understanding what the design is and will be by bringing it into their visual terms.
For instance, if we’d take a hospital build, the administration might want to test the plans before construction begins. At this point you may want to make a presentation right on the construction site. But that is a pretty expensive proposition, because you would have to take doctors away from work. So what you can do is to deploy the presentation locally and give it a run in virtual reality as a series of 3D models. In addition, using augmented reality in architecture helps to understand the impact of the facility on a place where it’ll be built. You can define a total footprint of that building over a 50-year window.
Sales
As we’ve already discussed Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in architecture allows the visual testing of buildings before they are actually constructed. It becomes especially useful on a large multi storey project when you want to show a client how the finished project will look.
This is a particularly useful way for VR and AR architecture to shorten the sales cycle. A sales team can provide future tenants or suite holders with the view of how their property may look like when the construction in done. This can be very handy while selling premium spaces up-front the construction. AR provides similar benefits. It allows employers to attract prospects by showing future facility.
Information Supply
Unlike manufacturing where you’re building the same car, a typical construction project has a vast amount of documentation that is constantly evolving.
Every single project you build is basically a prototype. Every single stadium or hospital is different. Construction is a constantly evolving information space. And sometimes information can be delivered days or even hours before you put work in place. In such conditions being able to provide data in a quick manner is invaluable.
What’s more important about virtual reality architecture is that you can plan out and execute construction in advance of physically building them, so that difficult decisions can be foreseen and worked out prior to the start of construction.
Equipment Monitoring
Every construction site has a vast array of equipment. You can have hundreds of different machines. AR can help recognise where these machines are, how they are being utilising at any particular moment.
Despite a great number of vehicles there are still moments when you have to share machines between different divisions. AR could give you an overview about how your equipment is being utilised and where it is being stored at any point allowing you to manage a project in a smarter more agile way.
Something important to understand that VR & AR technology can be used not only by architects and construction workers. It can be used to do a solar work, construct wind turbines, infrastructure facilities, etc. Thus by committing to these technologies, you open yourself to new markets from a technological standpoint.
