Extended Reality for Safe and Effective Construction Management: State-of-the-Art, Challenges, and Future Directions

Abstract

Safe and effective construction management requires tools for reducing delays, eliminating reworks, and avoiding accidents. Unfortunately, challenges still exist in current construction practices for enabling real-time interactions among project participants, field discoveries, and massive data. Extended reality (i.e., XR) could help to establish immersive and interactive virtual environments that enable real-time information exchange among humans, cyber processes, and physical environments during construction. However, limited studies have synthesized potentials, challenges, and scenarios of XR for ensuring construction safety and efficiency. This study provides a critical review that synthesizes XR in construction management. First, the authors used the PRISMA method to screen studies related to XR in construction management. Seventy-nine studies were selected and comprehensively analyzed. The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis to comprehend the spatiotemporal distributions of the selected studies. Then, the selected studies were classified into three categories: (1) progress control, (2) quality control, and (3) safety management. The authors also synthesized information for XR applications in various construction management scenarios and summarized the challenges related to XR applications. Finally, this review shed light on future research directions of XR for safe and effective construction management.

Research on the Application of Extended Reality in the Construction and Management of Landscape Engineering

“…As of October 2023, PRISMA, introduced in 2009 [72], has been adopted in over 60,000 publications across various disciplines. In review articles featured in journals such as "Buildings" [2], "Forests" [69], "Virtual Reality" [70], and "Automation in Construction" [73], a similar approach leveraging PRISMA's threestage or four-stage flow diagram for data selection has been observed. This study aligns with the updated PRISMA three-stage flow diagram from 2020 [74] for the screening of literature data.…”

“…The Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) is one of the clustered tag word extraction algorithms provided by Cite Space 6.2.R6 for extracting research terms at different locations in citing documents. Compared with other clustering algorithms, LLR emphasizes the research characteristics and is more suitable for the use requirements [2]. Utilizing the LLR algorithm within the clustering analysis, seven major research clusters (#0-#6) were identified.…”

“…[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]38] XR hardware devices XR devices pose discomfort issues such as motion sickness. [2,66,82,83] XR devices experience high network latency and low frame rates. [2,58,82,83] • XR hardware devices Considerations regarding the head-mounted design of XR devices encompass aspects such as weight distribution, headband material, and the overall helmet design.…”

“…In the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, XR holds immense potential for improving construction productivity, which enables effective control over construction progress, quality, and safety [2]. Specifically in the field of landscaping, XR has found extensive applications in areas such as the construction and simulation of landscaping models [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15], monitoring and maintenance of plant growth [4,6,[16][17][18][19][20][21], landscaping planning and design [9,13,14,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], perception and preference assessment of landscaping [11,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42]…”

“…The limitations of these literature reviews are as follows: (1) The focus is limited to the domain of landscape engineering or a specific application perspective, depicting only a particular functional scenario within landscape engineering. (2) The review content encompasses XR solely as a powerful technology that can create immersive interactive visual scenes and only deals with the dimensions of application content analysis without analyzing and discussing the technical application level of XR.…”