Multiuser immersive virtual reality application for realtime collaboration in design review process

Most project stakeholders have experienced problems understanding each other during a design review process of complex construction projects while staying remotely. In reality, the difficulty of sharing a common understanding during design review among remote project participants is a barrier to a successful project delivery. The recent advancement in visualization technology—Virtual Reality (VR) provides a practical solution to visualize and interact in the virtual environment of design, construction, and maintenance. However, the difficulty of bringing remote participants together in a virtual environment has impeded the implementation of VR technology in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. The recent development of VR makes possible the solution for interactive visualization for design, construction, and maintenance. To fill the gap, this thesis presents a developed VR application for the realtime collaboration approach for remote users that enables clients and design professionals to clearly explore every aspect of their virtual project and facilitates interpersonal project communication in an interactive VR environment by using VR headsets. The primary aim of this research is to develop and test a VR application that provides not only a shared immersive environment but also realtime interaction between users in the virtual world. To successfully conduct this research study, a comparison was made between the immersive VR and the non-immersive VR experience among 44 students in terms of realtime collaboration in a building inspection task. Results indicated that the users of the developed immersive VR application outperformed those of the non-immersive platform as measured by the percentage of correctly identified design errors during the building inspection experiment. In practice, the developed application is expected to assist the project participants to create a shared immersive environment of their virtual project for an effective design review before construction work begins.