Thesis Defence: Immersive collaborative building design platform to improve stakeholder communications in sustainability

Bo Su, supervised by Dr. Qian Chen, will defend their thesis titled “Immersive collaborative building design platform to improve stakeholder communications in sustainability” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Applied Science in Civil Engineering.

An abstract for Bo Su’s thesis is included below.

Defences are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. Registration is not required for in-person defences.

Abstract

The construction industry is rapidly transforming through integrated digital workflows that enhance sustainability assessment and stakeholder collaboration in design and construction. Although many studies integrated Building Information Modelling (BIM) with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to expedite the evaluation of the performance of various building options, they are mostly computer-based solutions disconnected from an immersive co-design environment restricting the designers and engineers from accessing an interactive, shared, full-scale (1:1) view of the design in context. To address this gap, this study proposes a low-latency WebSocket-based BIM design collaboration framework that integrates sustainability analysis with Mixed Reality (MR) technology to enable consistent data exchange between the immersive environment and parametric design alternatives. Geometry and material data can be automatically extracted as OBJ and MTL files to import into the WebSocket cloud server. The proposed MR framework was tested using an apartment building project, which loads OBJ and MTL files from the WebSocket server using a customized Unity plugin, parses the information, and processes them into a complete 3D model. The Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK)-3 was used to embed the LCA functions and results, and a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) was used to develop the 3D model dashboard that supports the development and deployment of the application to an MR-headset (HoloLens) to enable the onsite immersive test and stakeholders’ interaction with the design alternatives and sustainability evaluation results. The design information in MR will be inherited to the construction phase for on-site visualization and decision-making, reducing the possibilities of rework and material waste. Unlike the existing BIM-LCA research, the non-proprietary platform developed by this research provides low-latency data communication between BIM and the MR design platforms to allow almost real-time data exchange and updates for design assessment, which offers updated project information for the construction activities. Thus, the study demonstrates the integration of BIM, the WebSocket protocol, and MR platforms to enhance human-computer communication and stakeholders’ collaboration in sustainable design practice without relying on third-party MR software.