The field of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is continually striving to use resources efficiently and manage complex processes. Now more than ever, there is a strong need for digital transformation in AEC. The improvement in the accessibility of consumer-based head-mounted displays (HMD) is attracting different entertainment and research fields to immersive virtual reality (VR) applications. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is known as a promising technology in AEC. The full potential of BIM is not yet employed to empower this field, however, and this could be a result of some barriers still to be surmounted by BIM in both technological and management perspectives. One of these barriers is the communication and collaboration between design, construction, operation, and maintenance phases. VR can fill this gap by providing additional capabilities for BIM which either were not available before or were not possible to employ in practical ways. In this paper, we systematically review recent research around the application of VR in BIM and discuss the results using the PRISMA flowchart. We discuss the most commonly used technologies, software, and evaluation methods and the various applications of VR in the reviewed papers. Finally, we extend the discussion by summarizing the potential future work in this area.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies have become more affordable and accessible in recent years. This is opening up new methods and opportunities in the field of digital learning. VR can offer new forms of interactive learning and working, especially for subjects from the STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) area. In this context we investigate the potential and application of VR for computer science education with a systematic review in this paper. We present a formal literature review on the use of VR technologies in computer science education. We focus on the identification of factors such as learning objectives, technologies used, interaction characteristics, and challenges and advantages of using fully immersive VR for computer science education.

Digital twins are a promising technology for various application scenarios such as industry 4.0, medical applications or even urban planning. However, the representation and interaction is often complex and not intuitive. The use of virtual reality in the representation and interaction with digital twins can remedy this. In this paper, we survey the existing literature using the PRISMA guidelines to give a first overview of existing application scenarios, advantages, difficulties and also possible prospects for future work. We identified 30 relevant papers demonstrating first prototypes of combining digital twins with virtual reality. Most applications were in the field of industry 4.0. Popular use cases are remote operations, collaborations, or training and education. While many advantages are presented, also challenges such as VR interaction design, networking optimization, and optimized hardware controls open up also interesting future research fields.

Researchers study the user experience in Virtual Reality (VR) typically by collecting either sensory data or using questionnaires. While traditional questionnaire formats present it through web-based survey tools (out-VR), recent studies investigate the effects of presenting questionnaires directly in the virtual environment (in-VR). The in-VR questionnaire can be defined as an implemented user-interface object that allows interaction with questionnaires in VR that do not break the immersion. Integrating questionnaires directly into the virtual environment, however, also challenges design decisions. While most previous research presents in-VR questionnaires in the form of 2D panels in the virtual environment, we want to investigate the difference from such traditional formats to a presentation of a questionnaire format in the form of an interactive object as part of the environment. Accordingly, we evaluate and compare two different in-VR questionnaire designs and a traditional web-based form (out-VR) to assess user experience, the effect on presence, duration of completing the questionnaires, and users’ preferences. As the means for achieving this goal, we developed an immersive questionnaire toolkit that provides a general solution for implementing in-VR questionnaires and exchanging data with popular survey services. This toolkit enables us to run our study both on-site and remotely. As a first small study, 16 users, either on-site or remotely, attended by completing the System Usability Scale, NASA TLX, and the iGroup Presence Questionnaire after a playful activity. The first results indicate that there is no significant difference in the case of usability and presence between different design layouts. Furthermore, we could not find a significant difference also for the task load except between 2D and web-based layout for mental demand and frustration as well as the duration of completing the questionnaire. The results also indicate that users generally prefer in-VR questionnaire designs to the traditional ones. The study can be expanded to include more participants in user studies as a means of gaining more concrete results. Furthermore, additional questionnaire design alternatives can also help to provide us with a more usable and accurate questionnaire design in VR.

One of the most crucial aspects of the user experience in virtual reality (VR) is the sense of presence. To evaluate this, both subjective and objective methods can be employed. While subjective methods are easy to implement and interpret, they may not fully capture user feedback, and the results can sometimes lack consistency. In contrast, using objective methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG), can provide more reliable insights. To investigate the influence of realism on the sense of presence, we conducted an EEG study with 21 participants who experienced two VR environments—one realistic and one non-realistic. During the study, we continuously measured their brain activity using an EEG device. Our findings showed that alteration in the level of realism in an environment can be detected through changes in brain activity. Notably, we observed that users take longer to adapt to a non-realistic environment when transitioning from a realistic scene, compared to the reverse. Although our study has limitations, such as the total number of participants, we gained valuable initial insights into how realism may influence brain activity. These findings suggest that higher realism may lead to reduced cognitive load, increased attention, improved decision-making, and suppression of irrelevant information.

In this paper the influence of grain fragmentation on the change of the grain size distribution and an additional compaction of a cohesionless granular material was modeled in a simplified manner by introducing the mean grain diameter and the solid hardness as state variables into an extended micropolar hypoplastic model. The solid hardness was defined in the sense of a continuum description and was a key parameter for modeling the incremental stiffness. The reduction of the mean grain diameter and the solid hardness caused by grain fragmentation was described by evolution equations taking into account an increase of the mean pressure and a change of the stress deviator. Because in the extended model the critical void ratio also depended on the evolution of the solid hardness, a reduction of the critical void ratio caused by grain fragmentation also was taken into account. To investigate the effect of grain fragmentation on the mechanical response, numerical simulations of plane strain compression tests were carried out for two different types of tests. A biaxial compression test under unconstrained lateral deformation and a biaxial test of the Hambly type were simulated using the finite-element method. Particular attention was paid to the influence of the initial void ratio and the type of the lateral boundary conditions on the interaction between the evolution of strain localization and the reduction of the mean grain diameter. The numerical simulations showed that the reduction of the mean grain diameter was pronounced in zones of shear strain localization and it was larger for the initially dense specimen. The evolution of patterns of strain localization and of zones of intense reduction of the mean grain diameter strongly depended on the boundary condition of the test type.