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.
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