Virtual Reality & Construction

[Jlude]

There are a lot of people on this forum in the construction/O&G industry and many gamers, I thought there might be interest in seeing the two meet. My team has recently integrated the use of VR in our project workflow on all construction projects. It's been great for quality control, meeting with customer and design team members to review projects.

Is anyone doing anything similar to this? Here's a quick video, but you can see more content on our LinkedIn page also --> https://www.linkedin.com/company/jmt-consultants-inc-

[rage2]

I wish this was available when we were tryin to design our basement. Hopefully it’s mainstream enough when one day I decide to build a house.

[Darell_n]

I helped build the blood bank in Calgary and they used BIM models for the construction. Honestly, it is 100% for the owner and sales people to show off to the cheque writers. The issue is the contractor foremen on site with all the construction experience don’t have the time, training or energy to build the 3D models and the computer folk making the models apparently have no clue how to integrate all the systems in a rational and effective way. We ended up completing the install laid out by tape measure, as usual. But it looks cool for an enormous cost to everybody involved.

With regard to OP, one designer handling just the structure of a building looks to be beneficial. Take the same drawing and have different companies overlay their own electrical, plumbing, HVAC, controls, finishing etc and it becomes a giant hot mess.

[AndyL]

oh god not this again.

They've been doing variations on it since y2k ish. Was it millennium ue1 or aurora that they were always crowing about 4d cad and virtual reality to ensure no fuckups.

No they made the fuckups 10x worse... I still remember the big 4' steam pipe that ended on one side of the door and started again on the other side. Funny it didn't do that in real life.

Problem is it's sketched in by the engineers/architects not the guys doing the shop drawings or work, garbage in and garbage out as a result.

[ExtraSlow]

There are companies doing this with facilities with some success now. Onsite3d is the one I've seen. Seems to work, but that's based on thier marketing material. I have never been a customer.

[Jlude]

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I wish this was available when we were tryin to design our basement. Hopefully it’s mainstream enough when one day I decide to build a house.

It's great, I have a couple guys fluent with Sketchup and have done a few interior design projects. It's the best thing to get a feel for the space.

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I helped build the blood bank in Calgary and they used BIM models for the construction. Honestly, it is 100% for the owner and sales people to show off to the cheque writers. The issue is the contractor foremen on site with all the construction experience don’t have the time, training or energy to build the 3D models and the computer folk making the models apparently have no clue how to integrate all the systems in a rational and effective way. We ended up completing the install laid out by tape measure, as usual. But it looks cool for an enormous cost to everybody involved.

With regard to OP, one designer handling just the structure of a building looks to be beneficial. Take the same drawing and have different companies overlay their own electrical, plumbing, HVAC, controls, finishing etc and it becomes a giant hot mess.

That's just bad construction, I hear you though, everything moves so damn quick, no one takes the time to do things right. There is no enormous cost, the Oculus headset is $400 and the IrisVR software is about $1000 a license. It's part of our workflow, replacing model checking on a computer by doing it in VR. Spread over our annual project list, it's cheap.

We do structural/miscellaneous steel and concrete/rebar, but do BIM coordination on every project with MEP.

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oh god not this again.

They've been doing variations on it since y2k ish. Was it millennium ue1 or aurora that they were always crowing about 4d cad and virtual reality to ensure no fuckups.

No they made the fuckups 10x worse... I still remember the big 4' steam pipe that ended on one side of the door and started again on the other side. Funny it didn't do that in real life.

Problem is it's sketched in by the engineers/architects not the guys doing the shop drawings or work, garbage in and garbage out as a result.

Dude - I'm the guy that makes drawings that actually get built, not conceptual EOR/AOR sketches.

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There are companies doing this with facilities with some success now. Onsite3d is the one I've seen. Seems to work, but that's based on thier marketing material. I have never been a customer.

It works - but you need to have qualified people, like anything.

[Darell_n]

I guess the cost I was referring to was the total project hours spent on the 3D modelling, not just the VR portion of it. It certainly was a waste on the one large project I had with it. Ask anybody that did trade work in the Bow Building how well the virtual design worked there. Lol

[BavarianBeast]

Way back in 2013 I worked with PCL and Google Glass to create virtual construction environments. Could walk into an empty room and select mech/elec and have everything appear in virtual reality. It was really fun/cool but way too time consuming for projects that aren’t $1B+. I had a lot of fun with it though.