Interview with our CEO, Aldo Petruzzelli & Viveka Devadas at Autodesk on the state of XR in the AEC Sector
This interview has been moderated by Viveka Devadas, Design Technologist and Designated Specialist for AEC/VR products at Autodesk who helps customers adopt advanced visualizations and Extended Reality VR/AR/MR solutions into their everyday design workflows. If you’re interested in learning more about Autodesk XR Strategy, we suggest you watch a presentation Viveka gave at the Laval Virtual Europe.
How is XR being used today in AEC
Well, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector is probably one of the industries that are going to be impacted the most by XR Technologies. If we look at the diagram below, XR basically encompasses all the technologies under mixed reality, most notably Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
With Augmented Reality construction workers, real estate firms, builders, and even architects/designers can superimpose 3D Views of 2D plans or technical drawings to augment the visualization of any environment or an entire building. Virtual Reality (VR) on the other hand can take users and the people involved in any process to a completely new environment. They can either experience a property before it’s fully built, helping everyone spot any flaws in the construction of the architectural environment or to make final users experience tests so that designers/architects can either make sure there’s a market for it or the clients like it. If they do they can use a more polished experience to sell the properties without using renderings or even 2D plants. All these experiences are created in immersive environments that facilitate remote collaboration and communication.
The benefits of using XR in AEC
Immersive technologies, for all the benefits I can think of can most importantly reduce cognitive overload as it’s been proven by several research papers. This is especially true for AR but even VR has its peculiar benefit. Just think about the reduced costs from using VR and digitizing many business practices that would otherwise take place in an office. All of them can overall take stakeholders in the AEC industry to reduce costs, improve visualization which leads to focusing more on the core design. Immersive technologies can cut down steps so that there are more iterations to the design that further improve the final outcome. That said, with VR we previously said that users are taken to a new environment altogether. At the moment, deaths in the AEC sector account for more than 20% making health & safety a huge priority. The huge benefit of VR tech is that of recreating a dangerous environment in an innocuous space, the digital world.
At the moment, deaths in the AEC sector account for more than 20% making health & safety a huge priority. The huge benefit of VR tech is that of recreating a dangerous environment in an innocuous space, the digital world.
Training new employees for harsh environments is 1. difficult to test with traditional means (you can’t use written tests) 2. difficult to recreate in the real world because it either gets dangerous (reproducing the reality of the situation) or it’s not close to reality enough.
Mixed Reality (MR) for those new to the term can be thought of as something in between VR and AR, thus the benefits are similar and combined into one experience. The important thing to point out is that in an XR Experience the digital assets (whatever is not real and is overlaid in the field of view of the user) can be manipulated and treated as real objects. That implies wearing at least one of the Wearable devices in the market like the Microsoft Hololens 2. AR is the lowest barrier of entry solution given the fact we all have AR-enabled smartphones and then VR that also requires a headset and is fully immersive. Some VR Headsets are Oculus and the HTC Vive.
Examples of how XR is being used in AEC
Showing clients how a property will look without using desktop technologies but adding a layer of reality to it with virtual worlds.
AR Previews on Construction sites would also allow workers to have an X-Ray vision to view pipes and plumbing and have a 360° degree view of how a property is coming up.
This use case can span industries and include on-site training as well. In the AEC Sector, an experience like this one would serve as a better way to make periodical check-ins and do maintenance for teams far away. Furthering saving costs for lack of travel. Having superimposed digital information like this would remove the need to either have video calls and then exchange files as everything would happen at the same time.
VR Session used by a Studio with a headset. This session can be shared with clients and potential buyers and used at any stage of any process.
This use case highlights what a remote working session for new employees would look like.
What is the future of XR in AEC
I think it’s fair to say XR is the greatest revolution to AEC since CAD. Some people, including end-users, will not understand it however if we don’t commit to keep refining and doing our best to not only show to Businesses what’s possible now but exactly explain why right now is the time to invest. I’m a firm believer that any industry not only AEC will need some sort of XR Campaign or will need to implement it in their operations; just like businesses need a digital presence with a Website for Web 2.0, businesses will need XR for Web 3.
I also envision experiences and campaigns to be easily shared across subdomains like AR, VR, and MR as well as digital assets. At the moment, there are no standards around file formats and I hope at least big players will find a solution around that. One software that does that well at the moment is Revit (from Autodesk) which does a really good job inn importing BIM into XR with 3DS Studio Max and Unity.
Small issues and building blocks are also more likely to be solved by smaller players, like Aequilibrium. We try to show Businesses a variety of AR Use cases that make sense for them and help them with the selection of features they need based on their industries. At the end of the process, we match them with relevant AR Creators for the development. Our goal is to bridge the gap between businesses and AR Creators by facilitating the communication, understanding, and development of any AR Project.
Once players like us facilitate the connection then it’s going to be the software and the actual tools that build those experiences that will need to get better. There will be a variety of tools out there meant to serve different purposes, some tools will allow developers to add holograms or voice interfaces to experiences in the AEC industry and not. Others will allow easy superimposition of existing 3D Assets to be shared in augmented sessions (for AR) or virtual sessions for (VR).
There are a lot of technologies that need to be solved and the problems of adoption on the business side present a supplemental obstacle that will fade away with time. We just have to believe in it!
-A. Petruzzelli, CEO / Co-founder of Aequilibrium Inc. https://www.aequilibriuminc.com
