Interactive Virtual Reality Tool for BIM Based on IFC - Development of OpenBIM and Game Engine Based Layout Planning Tool - A Novel Concept to Integrate BIM and VR with Bi-Directional Data Exchange

With recent advancements in VR (Virtual Reality) technology in the past year, it has emerged as a new paradigm in visualization and immersive HMI (Human-machine Interface). On the other hand, in the past decades, BIM (Building Information Modelling) has emerged as the new standard of implementing construction projects and is quickly becoming a norm than just a co-ordination tool in the AEC industry.Visualization of the digital data in BIM plays an important role as it is the primary communication medium to the project participants, where VR can offer a new dimension of experiencing BIM and improving the collaboration of various stakeholders of a project. There are both open source and commercial solutions to extend visualization of a BIM project in VR, but so far, there are no complete solutions that offer a pure IFC format based solution, which makes the VR integration vendor neutral. This work endeavors to develop a concept for a vendor-neutral BIM-VR integration with bi-directional data exchange in order to extend VR as a collaboration tool than a mere visualization tool in the BIM ecosystem.