Chapter Investigation of the Acceptance of Virtual Reality for Planning Decisions in Early Design Phases

Abstract

In recent years, with the increasing digitization of the construction industry, the potential benefits provided by the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) have been shown especially in interdisciplinary networking among different stakeholders for which effective communication and information exchange methods are crucial. This is particularly significant during early design phases and associated decision-making processes where, despite its positive impact in terms of project’s time and cost savings, VR adoption still has to reach its full potential. For this reason, this paper investigates to what extent the acceptance and application of VR has developed and identifies possible integrations in the early planning phases. By conducting a multi-year study with representatives from the construction industry, including qualitative and quantitative survey methods, the current use of VR and the requirements for future applications are determined. The study reveals that VR's importance for design visualization has increased, identifies architects' current requirements and integration barriers. Additionally, these requirements are compared with existing VR possibilities and an approach for exchanging different variants in a building information model will be examined. Based on these findings, VR can be integrated in application-specific contexts and software can be adapted to architects' needs for optimizing the digitization process