I’m the co-founder of one of the popular VR tools in the AEC industry: Resolve (https://www.resolvebim.com). If you own a Quest 2 you can download it on the Quest store.

VR has been available as a tool for the AEC industry since the new wave of VR started about 10 years ago. Initially, and still today, VR is heavily used as a marketing tool to help architects, engineers and contractors win new business. It’s only recently that VR has started to make an impact on actually improving the design and construction process. Marketing is fine, but the potential for VR to reduce design issues and build more efficiently and safely is huge. We have some videos on our YouTube channel where you can hear direct from Resolve customers about how VR is impacting their construction projects: https://youtu.be/rf_-VDtQHFw

The main problem that was holding back VR (and AR, but AR has additional hardware issues) was primarily the fact that 3D cad models of complex construction projects are very large, geometrically dense, files and they couldn’t run on wireless VR headsets without spending dozens of hours of extra work to clean up and shrink down the models. Additionally, you would need to plug your headset into a beefy computer and then make sure IT was on hand to troubleshoot issues. This basically made it so that VR was too inconvenient to use at scale or frequently on a large project.

It’s only been in the last 18 months that this problem was solved. Resolve is the first (and still only) company that built a rendering engine that is capable of rendering these large CAD files natively on the Quest 2 without the need for extra work, an external computer or fancy streaming technology from a remote server. Over the last 18 months we’ve seen headset deployments across large projects ($300M+) dramatically increase from the old paradigm (2 to 3 headsets) now to over 30 to 50 headsets per project. We have some customers with over 500 headsets deployed.

Theres still a long road ahead for VR and AR in the AEC industry but the future is bright. Looking into the future I believe that VR will allow for complex simulations of not only construction of the building but also operations, maintenance, training, recruiting, community engagement, event planning, security drills, legal reviews, etc. VR should help us simulate the future, replay the past, and remotely operate the present.