Construction Tech Spotlight: Augmented & Mixed Reality
Of all the deep tech in construction, perhaps no other is more ready for prime time than augmented & mixed reality.
That’s because so much of construction involves envisioning what something (that doesn’t yet exist) will look like in physical space. The best construction workers have an almost effortless ability to see and plan work that they’ve never seen in real-life. Often, their job is not only to envision what their project will look like but then to plan and install it accordingly. It’s something that takes years or even decades of experience to perfect.
Which is why augmented & mixed reality strikes such an important chord: it gives a mind’s eye view of a yet-to-be-built job. It helps in cross-referencing contractor designs, ensuring that things are buildable, checking that nothing clashes, and coordinating construction details. It takes some of the mental labor out of what’s already a laborious profession.
Furthermore, what makes augmented & mixed reality so exciting is that many of the enabling technologies are already here. Many headsets are custom-built for industrial applications and there’s new software start-ups already bringing this vision to reality (no pun intended?)
This article gives you a high-level overview of the technology behind augmented & mixed reality. It brings a business understanding of why the technology is important to construction and where it will likely be used in the future.
What is augmented & mixed reality?
Put simply: Augmented & mixed reality projects virtual objects into the real world and allows users to interact with those objects.
You probably saw the earliest versions of this in 2016 with the Pokémon GO craze. Perhaps more than any application since, Pokémon GO highlighted augmented reality’s capabilities through its display of digital avatars in the real-world and allowing users to play alongside them via a hardware interface.
The hardware component is key because people use augmented & mixed reality software through smartphones, tablets, or smart glasses. The hardware provides the portal through which software then interprets and contextualizes things from the surrounding environment. For construction, having a hands-free headset is a huge value add.
This is a non-exhaustive list of augmented reality & mixed reality headset providers, some of which are more heavy industry-ready than others:
- Epson Moverio BT-350 **
- Everysight Raptor
- Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2
- Lenovo ThinkReality A3 **
- Magic Leap 2
- Merge AR/VR Headsets
- Meta Quest Pro**
- Microsoft HoloLens 2 **
- Mira **
- Nreal Light
- Project Aria (Facebook Meta)
- Realwear HMT-1Z1 **
- Solos
- Snap Spectacles
- ThirdEye Gen X2 **
- Toshiba dynaEdge AR100
- Vuzix Shield **
** Indicates that their marketing shows the headset is geared towards heavy industry, with features like ANSI certification or PPE compatibility.
Several adjacent technologies like SLAM and LiDAR and photogrammetry assist in creating this experience. But they all boil down to scanning the physical environment, positioning a user in that environment, and overlaying relevant information at a 1:1 scale.
How can augmented & mixed reality be used in construction?
Large construction projects are insanely complex. The largest projects in the world have so much extra schedule and cost built into them because project managers know that it’s almost impossible to account for all of the complexity.
Importantly, that complexity is almost always a coordination challenge and much of this coordination starts and ends in the field.
- Augmented & mixed reality provides an information bridge that connects the back office to the field. This means that field users no longer need to drop what they’re doing and head back to the office when they have an issue. Information can be provided directly to them or pulled from the jobsite through a digital interface. This includes upstream information like specifications and QA/QC manuals as well as downstream information like requests for information and field design changes.
- Augmented & mixed reality keeps project stakeholders in the loop on field issues. On nearly every project I’ve worked on, there’s been key stakeholders not informed or ill-informed of an issue. During the course of a project, these decision gaps accumulate and either lead to a change order or an upset customer (often both). By anchoring information to the job and allowing people to view it in the field, augmented & mixed reality ensures that everyone is aware of project decision-making.
- Augmented & mixed reality improves trade coordination by having specialty subcontractors and designers and all other project stakeholders literally seeing the same thing. Augmented & mixed reality helps take the guesswork out of stakeholders who are dependent on one another’s input and performance. It puts everyone’s cards face up on the table so that there’s no surprises.
Who is a typical user in construction?
Construction has a lot of services tangential to the act of installing material. These indirect services like scheduling, field documentation, quality control, and field engineering will nearly all be touched by augmented & mixed reality.
- Project Managers: Construction project management is really stakeholder management. They’re the ones standing at the back of the boat and yelling for everyone to row in unison. A core challenge in construction is that depending on how the project delivery machine is broken down and reformulated for their project, stakeholder interests almost always diverge. Having a tool like augmented & mixed reality allows project managers to effortlessly put designers and owners and field supervisors into a digital environment that keeps everyone in the loop and on course with project planning and execution.
- Field Workforce: So much of construction is breaking apart complex builds into smaller more manageable chunks and then coordinating those work activities. No one knows construction work better than the people doing the work. Augmented & mixed reality provides an opportunity for foremen and superintendents to interact with the design in a way that’s never really existed before. Streamlining constructability reviews and field change requests from the actual field will improve overall throughput by making those essential (and too often skipped) processes more efficient.
- Owner: The construction buck stops with the owner. This will be a single individual on smaller projects, while larger projects often include institutions or corporations who either hire a representative or manage their own in house construction management team. In all cases, the last thing a customer wants is surprises. Augmented & mixed reality provides an opportunity to make sure that owner teams are in the loop. This has the added benefit of leaving an excellent takeaway — a navigable digital representation of construction history for facility management to use.
What’s the business case for augmented & mixed reality in construction?
While it hasn’t yet captured the public imagination in the way that virtual reality has, I’d make the case that augmented & mixed reality is actually more applicable to a wider range of issues in construction today.
That’s because the industry’s digital data gap is mostly a back office to field divide. The industry’s transformation needs to happen in the field and augmented & mixed reality provides the transformational bridge to make that happen.
In most instances, the business case for augmented & mixed reality involves a core challenge in construction: project communication. Visualizing and interacting with 3D data onsite at 1:1 scale provides the opportunity to collectively interact with elements on the construction project before the big money’s actually invested in installing something.
It also takes away a lot of the small waste that cumulatively adds up to a ton of unaddressed waste across the industry. It’s all of the waiting, unnecessary walking, rework, and defects that are introduced into construction projects that augmented & mixed reality can address.
This new technology directly addresses so many small but fundamental issues that plague the construction industry. It will do for the jobsite of 2025 what smartphones did in 2005.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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