How AR Teams with BIM for Architecture, Construction

Brief 

Augmented reality holds the promise of achieving greater efficiencies in architecture with its ability to blend 3D digital models with physical building sites. AR often draws on building information modeling and gives all parties in a project a common way to try different solutions and identify clashes.

Insight

Arrayed against all other arts and sciences, architecture has been revered as the most immersive and enveloping creative discipline, one that results in habitable spaces that engage all of your senses.

This literal act of world-building starts out clumsy and small: drawings, sketches, static renderings, and bits of fly-through video. The technology is often developed by professional world-builders at video game companies, but has been adopted by designers and builders, who use extended reality (XR) and augmented reality (AR) to envelop clients, team members, and trades in a shared architecture vision like never before.

What is Augmented Reality in Architecture?

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that enhances and overlays a user’s physical world with a computer-generated input. In architecture, AR is the overlay of 3D digital building or building component models embedded with data onto real-world sites.

These models allow designers and builders to explore structural systems, mechanical systems, formal variables, finishes, furniture, and more, often derived from BIM models. Connected to all relevant trades, contractors, and subcontractors on the worksite, AR offers untold potential to experiment with design in an immersive environment and to troubleshoot clashes and errors before they’re committed to brick and mortar.

For hardware, AR uses either dedicated glasses—like Microsoft’s HoloLens or MagicLeap that fill your field of vision the hybrid digital environment—or a tablet or smartphone displaying the hybrid environment on its screen.

Using HoloLens 2, construction workers can identify risks early on and validate designs and install conditions from early-stage design through to construction. Reality capture is a vital element of AR, and the Holobuilder photogrammetry platform can build photo models of worksites and integrate 3D models from Revit or elsewhere.