In a building context, decisions made early in the design phase can have a major impact on maintainability of the resulting facility. Effectively leveraging the knowledge of facility management teams in the design stage can lead to improved maintainability in the operation phase, but this feedback can be challenging to elicit during the design stage because facility management teams may not be formed by the time of design. This requires designers, who may not have facility management experience, to think like facility managers in order to consider the needs of the maintenance teams. This paper examines the extent to which different visualization media may be able to enable individuals without prior maintenance experience to identify maintainability concerns in a design model. Student participants, without prior maintenance experience, were randomly assigned to explore a design to assess maintainability concerns with either augmented reality (AR) or a traditional computer screen for viewing a Building Information Model (BIM). Their perceptions, behaviors, and statements were recorded and analyzed. Results indicate that BIM supports better identification of potentially problematic areas, but AR allows users to more consistently determine why an area is problematic. This suggests an opportunity to use a hybrid BIM/AR approach for identifying and resolving maintainability considerations during the design phase. The findings from this work provide evidence to illustrate how AR and BIM may enable individuals with limited experience to be able to effectively think like facility managers in order to make better maintainability decisions during design to lead to a better building during operation.
The construction industry is facing a severe labor shortage that is threatening the performance of projects around the world. Advanced technologies may be able to alleviate the effects of this labor cliff. Specifically, Augmented Reality (AR) has been shown to enhance the performance of current industry professionals completing different construction tasks and is also being explored as a learning tool for students and technicians alike. This research studies if AR can be used as a tool to enable untrained individuals to complete construction tasks. Three groups were identified for this research: construction professionals, construction students, and individuals with no construction experience. All three groups completed two construction tasks with AR, including the assembly of prefabricated electrical conduit and the layout of electrical devices in a room. The results show that all three groups completed the task in statistically similar times; however, the work of individuals with no construction experience had significantly lower accuracy during the electrical device layout task. These results suggest that construction companies may be able to leverage untrained individuals to perform certain construction tasks with AR, enabling trained and experienced professionals to focus on more challenging tasks.
Effective use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) during operation typically requires modeled content to accurately match the built spaces, which necessitates effective field verification techniques to ensure that BIM content matches the actual built conditions. Some contractors leverage laser scanning and other reality-capture technologies to verify modeled content prior to turnover, but these approaches can be time- and resource-intensive. Augmented reality (AR) enables users to view BIM content overlaid on their field of view of the built space. Research suggests potential for using AR for tasks related to field verification, but a study that systematically explores the specific types of deviations that can be detected with this technology is missing from the current literature. This paper tasks participants with using immersive AR to identify deviations from BIM in a ceiling plenum space that includes installed Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP) components, which would typically be included in a coordinated BIM. The results suggest that AR can enable users to effectively identify large deviations and missing building elements. However, the results do not indicate that AR effectively enables users to identify small deviations and can potentially lead to identifying false positive observations, where accurately constructed elements are perceived as deviating from BIM. These results suggest that immersive AR can effectively be used to check whether recently built elements conform to the intended BIM in instances where speed of verification is more important than adhering to strict tolerances. For instances where accuracy (less than two inches) is critical, the results of this work suggest that AR can be used to help determine where in the building more accurate, but more resource-intensive, reality-capture technologies should be used.
Augmented Reality (AR) has been in use for years, and is increasingly being adopted in the construction industry. Research has explored various applications of AR in construction to identify its benefits and drawbacks. To synthesize these findings, prior works have conducted literature reviews about AR in construction, but these papers generally focus on identifying attributes for which there is consensus about AR benefits or drawbacks. While this is important, it highlights the need to identify trends in AR literature for which there is divergence in reporting to better understand the underlying contextual factors that may impact the success of AR implementation. This paper investigates trends in AR literature by studying both benefits and limitations reported when using current generation AR devices for construction applications. This is done by reviewing 49 articles from 2013 to 2020 found through a key word search for “augmented reality”, “mixed reality” and “construction”. The papers are categorized according to the most common attributes reported. The benefits and limitations identified are analysed based on how the technology was used. For several AR attributes, including ease of implementation, learning/training time, field of view, hardware and software performance, occlusion and immersiveness, there was consensus in reporting among researchers. For other AR attributes, including cost, cognitive performance, development time, tracking and registration, attitude towards the technology, and efficiency, there was divergence in reports among researchers. For each of these divergent attributes, the authors provide a discussion related to the contextual factors that were present. Beyond illustrating that some attributes do not lead to agreement between researchers, the results also indicate contextual factors that may contribute to the difference in reports. These findings contribute to the literature by enabling researchers to include or exclude contextual factors to gain or mitigate previously reported benefits or challenges when using AR in construction.
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