BIM
Augmented reality
Thanks to gaming and meta-tech, virtual reality (VR) headsets have become accessible to every company, offering usa email list designers a wealth of immersive tools. Headsets like the Varjo XR-4 are the latest in tech and are used by many design firms in product and automotive development, but they don’t come cheap. Everyone is also eager to get their hands on the Apple Vision Pro. And while this first-generation headset isn’t cheap, it delivers the wide-angle, high-resolution mixed reality experiences we’ve all been hoping for. And while a full ecosystem for the headset has yet to be developed, we expect the Apple Vision Pro to be used in real-world construction projects in the first few months of 2024, when extended reality, or xR, will finally start to bear fruit.
Developers' opinions
It would be unfair if this article only described one point of view on the future of BIM. Therefore, I will present the opinions of representatives of several leading startups in this field:
BIM has always been an elusive promised land. Today, the technology is treated more as a data exchange process than as a project development process. This is where BIM’s true potential has not been realized.
We talk about how design and construction are non-linear workflows, and traditional BIM tools force a more linear approach to their execution. With the move to cloud-based database models, we can see this changing, and developers moving away from static, proprietary, isolated files to interconnected data sets, making them more flexible to use, accessible, and updatable in real time. But more importantly, how interconnected data allows for collaboration with different levels of access (both synchronously and asynchronously). And when collaboration is done in a modern, intuitive user interface (UX), we can see how design committees in offices and on construction sites work with data streams. This data, in turn, is stored in a special repository, and is shown to different participants at different times depending on the context.
In other words, sustainability research requires data presented in a planar format. Construction requires creating documents and assigning responsibilities for them. The data needed for this can be obtained from a parent data source and presented in the required amount of detail. And then, of course, there is artificial intelligence. Once we have centralized data pools, we will see what modern machine learning algorithms can emerge from this.
Timmen Strobbe: Head of Product Development, Co-Founder of Qonic
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question, “What will BIM look like in the future?” Most likely, we will see more organized collaboration. In order to collaborate online on a large scale, BIM technologies will need to become cloud-based. This will lead to more organized information flows, greater mobility (in the field), and the ability to access data through multiple paths (web browser, mobile devices, and desktop computers).
Another part of the answer to the question of the future of BIM lies in productivity. Regardless of the size and complexity of the tools, users should not adapt to the limitations of the technology. The tools of the future must be convenient for working on large-scale projects and maintain productivity at a high level of detail in the models. Openness of data also plays a big role. Technologies built on open standards should connect with other tools and practices already used in projects. In addition, BIM technologies should be accessible through powerful APIs so that each participant in the industry can bring new logic, styles or approaches to them.