Design Collaboration for Intelligent Construction Management in Mobilie Augmented Reality

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is not a novel concept, but there is a growing interest in design collaboration using BIM for construction management in the AEC industry. Recently, mobile computing and augmented reality (AR) become new variations on desktop computers since the combination can create ubiquitous workspaces for practices by providing seamless interactions between the digital and physical worlds in the context of the real world. This paper introduces the a potential of MAR for design collaboration in the AEC industry by associating the concept of BIM with mobile computing and AR. Firstly, this paper reviews MAR and the concept of embodied interaction for understanding interactive experiences in collaborative environment and then illustrates the construction management process in MAR with BIM in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration. Two aspects of MAR technology are critical to the management process supports. Mobility enables seamless access to a shared workspace and team members without time and location constraints and the context-awareness in AR allows fluid interaction with shared representation immersed in context. Based on the understandings of MAR and BIM, we develop scenarios of MAR for the intelligent construction management in order to address the implications of the MAR on the future development of collaborative systems.