Abstract/Summary

How can virtual reality be used in the operation, design and construction of the built environment? The first edition of this book came out in the childhood of virtual reality use in the built environment, but the rapid pace of technological development in VR systems and digital platforms presents us with the challenge of making appropriate choices for using VR to obtain real value. In this book we consider some key questions: What is virtual reality? How is it used in the built environment? What is the value proposition? What can we anticipate about its use in the future? These questions are pertinent as the increasing use of digital data through Building Information Modelling (BIM) and related technologies, leads to a renewed interest and more mature use of virtual reality to visualize and understand data to make decisions. In this second edition we examine how the ongoing process of growth and development involved in the uptake of VR often introduces new visualization approaches into practices that are already digital. We expand the scope to consider both immersive virtual reality as a way of bringing professionals inside a building information model, and augmented reality as a way of taking this model and related asset information out to the job-site. We consider these approaches in the context of other technological developments that were in their infancy when the first edition was written, such as laser scanning, mobile technologies and big data.