Evaluation of Virtual Reality for Early-Stage Structure and Production Planning for Industrial Buildings

Efficient communication between stakeholders is key to successful project planning in the AEC industry. The workflow proposed in the research project BIMFlexi enables interdisciplinary exchange already at the early stages of industrial building planning by using Building Information Modeling for integral design of the future production and the building structure. Communication in BIMFlexi is supported by a Virtual Reality platform, BIMFlexi-VR, that provides a multi-user virtual environment in which architects, structural engineers, production planners and production owners can collaboratively change parameters of the planned building and see the resulting changes in the building geometry and various fitness metrics in real-time. This paper discusses the results of the evaluation of BIMFlexi-VR by interdisciplinary teams of professionals from the AEC industry, which identified a strong potential of our platform for interdisciplinary presentation and communication.