From new immersive technologies to life saving applications, virtual reality is finally meeting up to expectations of the 1990s and transforming the way that projects are designed. Its ability to improve visualisation of new and existing infrastructure is bringing many benefits, including some that users hadn’t anticipated as well as saving millions of pounds in prevention of expensive construction re-work.        

As VR takes off we spoke to the pioneers proving that immersion in digital infrastructure is not a future technology but part of the new normal when it comes to the built environment. And as infrastructure is increasingly digitised, it offers a way through the looking glass into the world of the digital twin.

Quite simply, virtual reality tricks our brains into believing that something is real when it isn’t. And today that means using computer generated imagery in an immersive way. Some may attribute this experience as a mere leisure activity, but industries are showing that it can be implemented for the maintenance and design of assets in the built environment.

VR in the Built Environment

“So virtual reality is, in essence, when you’re inside a computer generated world, and you access it using some type of headset or device, typically, they put it on and you can see around you and you’re immersed in that way” says Simon Evans, director of digital engineering at the design, engineering and project management consultancy Atkins.

Simon says that both immersive technology and virtual reality are of regular use and are popular at Atkins. One of the benefits of introducing VR is that it can save the industry money. According to a report from Atkins’ parent company SNC Lavalin, the cost of construction re-work comes to almost $2 billion a year in the US.

But virtual reality can reduce these errors. To test it out the company brought virtual reality into an oil and gas project after the traditional design reviews had taken place. Operation and maintenance teams who had never used VR before immersed themselves in the design and identified 32 improvements. As a result, $2.4 million was saved on that particular project.

Simon Evans: “Particularly around providing spatial context and understanding an environment. For us virtual reality and this technology in general comes back to visualisation and collaboration. How can you visualise the environment in the faster, better way? And how can you collaborate around that not only yourself individually with maybe individuals in your office, but also with people further afield? So how can we connect people from around the world into the same environment and collaborate around it just like having a conference call?”

As well as reducing expenditure, VR can offer a better understanding of a spatial environment that acts as a catalyst for more savings.

“So we’ve had examples where we’ve been using hazard reviews or risk reviews, and we’ve been looking around the model on the computer screen and have identified of course for in the normal prompts, different challenges and things to change”, says Simon. “And then we put on some virtual reality goggles and have immediately spotted something very quickly because it was obvious because of the spatial arrangement, like that valve is pointed the wrong way.”

Essentially these benefits come back to one idea – better visualisation.

Not Just a Headset

In October 2019 Engineering Matters headed over to Digital Construction Week at the ExCel in London to get a full VR experience. One of the first things that we noticed was an innovative dome-like shape, which looked like something from a future base camp on Mars…but was in fact a a virtual reality pod. This experience was created by Soluis Group – a company that specialises in coordinated visual engagement. “What we do is we level the playing field” says Scott Grant, CEO of Soluis Group, “and technical data suddenly becomes this manageable data source that people can stand inside and take the value of that data outside the project teams and as far up and along the stakeholder network as it needs to go…”

Scott Grant: “Now in the construction sector and property broadly, there’s a limit as to how much dialogue can take place in a VR headset so we find that people don’t spend long enough and it kills the conversation. So what we’ve done here over the last few years has really developed thinking around what an immersive review platform should be. So this is effectively a large VR lens. So a large group of people could stand in here, but yet be totally convinced by the scale and realism of the space that this becomes a reference to the conversation, rather than the focus of the engagement.

Soluis are not the first to create this immersive experience, in fact its origins date back to the 1960s when pioneering filmmaker Morton Heilig created ‘the cinema of the future’. Shaped almost like an arcade machine, the user would sit within it and watch one of the

5 short films that Morton created for his machine that became known as the “Sensorama”. In the films such as a motorbike ride through New York, the aroma of petrol, pizza snack bars and gusts of wind would surround the viewer – Heilig’s cinema of the future didn’t hold back as users would have an immersive experience that was very much before it’s time.

Although this experience was well received it was way ahead of the technical development needed to bring it into the mainstream. But this is changing.

Anglian Water’s Virtual Reality Journey

Mark Hedges is the digital strategy manager for Anglian Water, which supplies drinking water to 4.3 million people in the UK, whilst maintaining 6,000km of sewers and 1000 water recycling (sewage) works. They also maintain and control 23,727 miles of water mains, which, if laid out end to end, is the distance from London to Sydney and back. With all of this to keep an eye on, the introduction of virtual reality has been transformative.

It began within their @OneAlliance – their partnership of seven companies which delivers the water company’s capital investment programme. Mark and his team thought long and hard about how they could transform the site environment for their teams, and opted to use virtual reality.

“So the historical way was to look at piles and piles of 2d drawings”, says Mark “And the problem with those is that they’re reasonably ineffective at communicating real design intent. Everyone looking at a set of drawings will have a slightly different idea of what the finished product or outcome is going to be. The great thing about 3D is that it cuts through all of that, you look at a 3D model, it’s far more native to the way that we work and it’s far more understandable. And when you think about VR, it really increases that engagement a million times, because you’re immersed in the model, you’re not just looking at it, you are immersed in it.”

Like any journey there were lessons learned along the way from issues with convincing project managers to spend money at the ‘proof of concept stage’ to simply getting reluctant colleagues at to use these new innovations.

However, once VR became a part of the furniture, great things followed. Tony Palmer, who is the digital asset creation project and VR lead for Anglian Water cites an example where VR was put to good use in the terms of saving and reducing expenditure:

“We had a large building with a load of kit in that building. And it was just a bit too big for the planning applications. Operations people came along and they said ‘we don’t think that’s quite big enough. We don’t think we got the space we need to work in there’”

But this all changed as soon as they tested it out using virtual reality. “As soon as we put them in the VR, they went ‘actually there’s loads of room in here, we’re fine with it.’”

When Tony worked out the cost saving from bringing that building size down, it turned out to be around £25,000.

The @OneAlliance and Anglia Water chose the Prospect software from IRIS VR – a company that specialises in VR and immersive media programmes. This software offers a multi-user feature, which enables a number of colleagues at a time to move around within a project. When activated, users can also talk with each other and make suggestions about certain amendments all in real time, which is useful from a collaborative perspective.

From a visual perspective, Prospect has taken into account the different environments in which users work such as whether it is day or night, summer or winter. Mark and Tony, talked us through it first hand.

Tony Palmer: “If I drag it along to the evening the shadows go, the light goes. So eight o’clock tonight the moon’s out the stars are out if we’re lucky and it’s not overcast and cloudy in reality…”, Mark Hedges: “That’s fantastic. You really begin to appreciate the challenges of operating an industrial plant like this water treatment works at different times of the year and different times of the day. And we know that our operational colleagues have to respond to all kinds of issues on site 24/365. So it’s really interesting to see the different conditions that they might be being asked to work in, and how we might mitigate those health and safety risks in the design before we get to build the plant…”

The future for VR in the Built Environment

Virtual reality is one element of a wider digital transformation happening in the built environment. One of those parts is the implementation of the ‘digital twin’, which is essentially a digital version of a physical asset (see ‘Related Listens’ to listen to EP.31 – ‘Creating a National Digital Twin). This requires secure sharing of high-quality standardised data between infrastructure owners and operators, making operations more efficient and resilient. “I think they’re things you know, we really should be looking at and we’ve thought about them, but we’ve not actually delivered anything really yet”, says Mark. “So they’re exciting fields to move into. And you know, it just means that our work isn’t done. In fact, we’re only just getting started!”

Simon Evans agrees that there is huge potential here. “So this technology, in my view, is intrinsically linked to the digital twin story and the digital twin approach”, says Simon. What virtual reality provides is that viewport into the digital twin that you view in a different way, just like you could view it on your mobile phone. So for me, having the ability to visualise the asset in virtual reality is intrinsic in that story…” says Simon.

For others the next step in the virtual reality story is augmented reality (AR) which offers users the ability to interact through a piece of software in a real world environment, rather than a super-imposed environment that VR offers. “So if you’re thinking about augmented reality where you’ve got an overlay of the virtual onto the real, the elimination of service strikes through augmented reality I think is very reachable,” says Mark. “We really ought to be able to deliver that within the next 18 months, two years I think. And along with that is you know, you have your associated health and safety risk reductions, the reductions in inconvenience either to our own operations or to the general public when we hit things that we really shouldn’t be hitting and the associated business risk reduction that goes along with that.”