A consortium featuring immersive and virtual environment specialist HoloVis has won £185,000 funding for a three-year collaborative research programme to develop an affordable Mobile Immersive Visualisation Suite for use on building sites.
Other partners in the Immersive Visualisation in Construction (iViC) project are Cullinan Studio Architects, Hyde Housing and WMG at the University of Warwick. The project aims to improve the communication of design data, helping to achieve the UK Government’s targets of buildings being delivered more quickly, at lower cost, and with fewer defects.
The funding was awarded by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, which works with business and other partners to accelerate economic growth.
Stuart Hetherington, managing director of Holovis, commented: “We are delighted to be working with our partners to encourage a radical rethink of the build process and supply chain relationships in the construction industry through the deployment of immersive, collaborative technologies. We specialise in transforming the sensory experience and whether this is for theme park attractions, augmented reality installations or data manipulation, similar principles can be applied to revolutionise a process or experience. The potential innovative gains, productivity improvements and savings generated for the industry could be immense.”
Colin Rice from Cullinan Studio said: “The construction industry can only deliver better quality and better value buildings by working as collaborative teams. Good communication lies at the heart of collaboration and we are very excited to be working with our partners to explore tools that will bring to the industry enhanced ways of visualising project information and supporting good decision-making.”
Dr Alex Attridge, project manager, product evaluation technologies, WMG added: “WMG’s past research in this field has been predominantly automotive-focused, so the iViC project gives us both a new challenge in the form of different industry requirements, and an opportunity to apply best practice from sectors where the use of immersive visualisation is more established.”
