Supporting Construction and Architectural Visualization through BIM and AR/VR: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes recent research on integrating BIM with AR and VR technologies across building lifecycle phases, highlighting predominant focus areas and use cases in construction, design, and operation.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive categorization of 32 recent studies on BIM with AR/VR, revealing trends and gaps in application across different lifecycle phases.

Findings

Most approaches focus on the construction phase.

VR is mainly used in the design phase.

AR is prevalent in construction and operation phases.

Abstract

The Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry deals with the design, construction, and operation of complex buildings. Today, Building Information Modeling (BIM) is used to represent information about a building in a single, non-redundant representation. Here, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can improve the visualization and interaction with the resulting model by augmenting the real world with information from the BIM model or allowing a user to immerse in a virtual world generated from the BIM model. This can improve the design, construction, and operation of buildings. While an increasing number of studies in HCI, construction, or engineering have shown the potential of using AR and VR technology together with BIM, often research remains focused on individual explorations and key design strategies. In addition to that, a systematic overview and discussion of recent works combining AR/VR with BIM are not yet fully covered. Therefore, this paper systematically reviews recent approaches combining AR/VR with BIM and categorizes the literature by the building's lifecycle phase while systematically describing relevant use cases. In total, 32 out of 447 papers between 2017 and 2022 were categorized. The categorization shows that most approaches focus on the construction phase and the use case of review and quality assurance. In the design phase, most approaches use VR, while in the construction and operation phases, AR is prevalent.