Gafcon Digital Finds that Virtual Reality Reduces Change Orders and Minimizes Delays During Construction
Project Team Tests Resolve as an Emerging Technology on 35,000-square-foot Tenant and Lab Fit-out
CONFIDENTIAL CLIENT
Fortune 100 Technology Company – 35,000 sf Tenant and Lab Fit-out of an existing space.
PROJECT CHALLENGE
On a typical project, the BIM coordination process is limited to the design and construction teams. This leaves out critical stakeholders, like facilities management, security, or even culinary, to participate in the design and review process. When these stakeholders are asked to look at designs and bring up any usability concerns, it is often much more expensive or too late to address their concerns than if they were consulted earlier in the project.
A CASE FOR EVALUATING VIRTUAL REALITY
This project was heavily invested in BIM and the design and construction stages were the backdrop for the client to explore, learn, and document emerging technologies that expand the ROI of BIM. Gafcon Digital chose to test virtual reality (VR) as an immersive tool to understand the impact of VR on design, construction, and operations. With VR, cross-discipline stakeholders can engage with BIM in a way that helps the team find issues earlier without needing to become expert BIM users. The goal was to reduce change orders, minimize project delays and familiarize facilities managers with building systems as much as possible before Day 2 operation.
THE SOLUTION - RESOLVE SOFTWARE
Gafcon Digital chose Resolve for this project because the dense equipment in the lab was seamlessly handled by its rendering engine. The standalone VR headsets helped maximize engagement across project team members and were easy for them to use. Instead of looking at 2D plans or a 3D model on a screen, users were able to simulate day-to-day procedures using fully tracked VR headsets. This enabled them to identify critical issues early, when designers could more easily address their concerns.
The Resolve VR workflow utilizes federated BIM coordination (Navisworks .NWD) files for viewing the model. Federated BIM can get very large and complex so it was critical that the application used for VR could handle the model without additional work or complicated setups. Resolve’s Wellington Engine handled the models smoothly and everyone was able to use a VR headset from home due to work-from-home mandates during the pandemic.
The client’s investment in a BIM-enabled digital lifecycle means that the BIM Coordination team already publishes a federated Navisworks .NWD to a common data environment (in this case Autodesk BIM 360). Resolve has developed a streamlined integration that automatically syncs models between Autodesk Construction Cloud and Resolve. There is no need for someone to be in charge of exporting special VR models and uploading to another 3rd party server. The end user simply accesses a VR headset or desktop app to enter the model. Users then walk the project at 1:1 to review the layout. Issues are captured using the speech-to-text annotation feature built into Resolve. With the BIM 360 integration, all annotations left in VR can be tracked into BIM 360 issues. To follow up on VR annotations, the design and construction team can see the comments in BIM 360 where they can leverage existing issue tracking workflows to close them out. Given the sensitive nature of this project it was also tantamount that we choose a VR application with enterprise-grade security, like Resolve.
ROI SUMMARY
Resolve works well for quality assurance, to help us adhere to client standards, and to increase stakeholder engagement. It helped us reduce the time it takes to review models and identify constructability and safety issues earlier in the design. The team found the Resolve onboarding process to be easy to implement and easily integrated into a common data environment. Resolve was able to deal with large data sets and since photorealistic visualization was not required for this project, the team prioritized accessibility to the complex content in choosing Resolve.
“The Resolve customer success team was with us every step of the way. They made sure the project got the measurable results that we and our client wanted from the use of VR.”
-Gafcon Digital Project Lead John Niles
According to Procore research, the average construction RFI costs an estimated $1,080 to review and respond to. This process also takes up to 10 days. According to Smartsheet research there are over 700 RFIs per project. This can total over $700,000 in RFIs on a large project.
Increasing stakeholder feedback on the design ultimately drove changes to the design earlier and eliminated multiple RFIs saving substantial time and money. The team was able to discuss batches of issues in a single meeting rather than responding to one-off RFIs, which require context switching and can be time consuming to complete. “I would estimate that we had an 800% improvement in communication efficiency when resolving issues,” said Niles.
Beyond RFIs, we also believe our QA process with Resolve led to more efficient building operations during the rest of the building lifecycle, reducing the total cost of ownership for the client. By soliciting feedback from operations teams, areas of the building were optimized to reduce operations costs and risk. Some of the issues found in VR would have introduced maintenance inefficiencies that add to significant costs throughout the lifecycle of the building.