Exploring Virtual Reality in Construction, Visualization and Building Performance Analysis

In the past two decades, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has investigated different approaches to improve communication among project parties, including Virtual reality (VR) however these approaches have not been widely adopted by the industry. Today, the tremendous advancements in technologies and computer hardware have potentially improve d the current approaches and enabled a significant enhancement of user experience of Virtual reality (VR) devices. Based on that the researchers have conducted a review to investigate the global VR applications research in (AEC) community in 2015-2017 to understand the status and the trend of immersive virtual reality (IVR) research in the world using these affordable devices. This paper also presents a result of an experiment to integrate three different types of AEC digital modeling data and proposed workflows for IVR applications in construction, visualization and building performance analysis. The experiment deals with construction simulation, rapid generation of the VR scene for existing building and airflow visualization. Several workflows investigated game engine and VR tools have been used.