Following.

Dear Poorang,

Augmented and/or virtual reality can help the AEC research and practice in several ways. Here are a few examples.

- As an advanced way to visualize design alternatives and performance simulations (from initial architectural concepts to detailed integrated design stage)

- During construction phase; experts and clients can see the preview of any revised element in 1 to 1 scale before installation. Computer models and simulation results for various purposes can be integrated with virtual and real network of things and people. E.g. name and positioning of elements, list and amount of materials, machinery, staff, etc.

- Post occupancy; various building performance parameters can be monitored for research and management purposes. E.g. actual operational energy consumption, green house gass emissions, etc.

Please also have a look at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325871906_Internet_of_Things_and_the_Future_of_Life-Cycle_Assessment_in_Smart_World

Best,

Aryan

Dear Poorang, In my opinion, VR is for better communication between different disciplines (thinking about building technology versus design issues), with customers who are not trained in the grade of abstraction between 2d and real 3d-world, and of course of "learning" the scales before buliding up something.

AR is a little bit different due to technical issues (referencing via GPS, or image detection). Lightmarker technology can be helpful in future for integrating AR in large real world scenarios.

Hololens as a special technology can be interesting in "making the invisible visible", so if you have for example BIM models, and you have to look through real walls (limited unfortunately due to the infrared detection of objects in outdoor light situations).

So in short to your question:

-mockup creations

-communication (perhaps in public participation processes)

-design (understanding)

-teaching / explaining

all the best

Peter

Thanks Peter Zeile and Aryan Shahabian for your posts.

I agree with both however it is much more difficult to work in some areas than the others when it comes to VR and more specifically in AR. I’ve recently reviewed a couple of papers in this area which although we’re good attempts missed on the research methodology 101 and that was a shame!

We have also published a couple of papers recently mostly in conferences to test the ground and believe that there definitely are new boundaries to be explores and new grounds to cover.

At SET, UoB, we have recently won some investment fund for developing AR/VR research in our school and acquired a good mix of AR/VR Technologies (HoloLens included). We are still to set up our new lab physically but good news is that we will be up and running soon.

on another account in an independent research group I lead we are also concentrating on self-commissioned research in this area.

The discussion here was what we have in our group as a regular topic and have recently decided to dedicate our next project to a couple of ideas which will hopefully come to fruition soon.

Ill keep updating the post both in here and in a project I’ve set up on RG.

Thanks again and hope we can develop some areas of joint research activities in the near future.

Poorang