Digitally Designing the Physical World XR for Architecture and Construction

A week ago, last Monday evening I presented at a local meetup group Design Reality that was for an AEC focused XR event. My goal was to expand the awareness of AR/VR beyond the 3D rendered images commonly used in pre-construction design reviews and into what I see as a sweet spot in AEC construction. XR is the new term for eXtended Reality which combined AR/MR/VR and is a nice high level since it appears that all three will be combined in the future more and more.

Augmented Reality (AR) also called Mixed Reality (MR) using hardware like the Microsoft Hololens, provides the benefit of providing the wearer with heads up information about the construction projects. Heads up information such as the BIM model overlaid on what you see to provide a visual of what has been added, QA/QC checking, construction reviews, walkthroughs, and more.

I used a recent example of the new Autodesk Portland office where the historic Towne Storage building, a brick building from 1913 was brought up to code…