This article presents our findings from a three-stage research project, which consists of the identification, development, and evaluation of a defect management Augmented Reality (AR) prototype that incorporates Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies. Within the first stage, we conducted a workshop with four construction-industry representatives to capture their opinions and perceptions of the potentials and barriers associated with the integration of BIM and AR in the construction industry. The workshop findings led us to the second stage, which consisted of the development of an on-site BIM-based AR defect management (BIM-ARDM) system for construction inspections. Finally, a study was conducted to evaluate BIM-ARDM in comparison to the current paper-based defect management inspection approach employed on construction sites. The findings from the study revealed BIM-ARDM significantly outperformed current approaches in terms of usability, workload, performance, completion time, identifying defects, locating building elements, and assisting the user with the inspection task.

We present the 3D User Interaction Toolkit (3DUITK), an open-source toolkit consisting of 25 Virtual Reality (VR) interaction techniques proposed from thirty years of prior research. Although interaction has been a topic heavily explored in previous papers, much of the research is yet to be re-implemented into an easy to use toolkit. Existing open-source VR interaction solutions provide basic functionality with few available techniques to choose from, and there has yet to be an open-source immersive user interaction toolkit to date. In this paper, we provide an overview of 3DUITK which includes the features, related works, design decisions, example applications, limitations, and future directions. While the focus of this work is on the VR context, 3DUITK has been employed in spatial augmented reality and mobile augmented reality applications.

This paper presents IVR-LPSim: An Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) Lighting Performance Simulator (LPS) capable of real-time indoor artificial illuminance, glare, daylighting and energy consumption calculation and visualisation. Current LPS's consist of traditional ex-ocentric CAD-based interfaces built for desktop-based PC displays. Lighting performance data is represented using reports, numerical datasets, two-dimensional graphs, charts and static visualisations. Additionally, PC-based LPS's do not provide real-time simulation support, creating a gap between the design and analysis process. As an alternative to current approaches, we present a novel LPS that leverages VR technologies to support an egocentric approach for lighting performance design and analysis. Three immersive lighting performance visualisations are presented to facilitate the representation of lighting performance data within IVR-LPSim.