Critical Review of Virtual Reality Applications in Offsite Construction Research

Offsite construction (OSC) techniques are argued to provide superior quality and shorter schedules compared with traditional techniques. Nonetheless, the pace of OSC implementation has been slow due to the influence of several barriers. In recent years, virtual reality (VR) applications have been used to address many of these barriers and promote the implementation of OSC projects. However, a comprehensive and coherent literature review that establishes the current state and categorizes VR applications in OSC projects is still lacking. To address this research gap, this study provides a state-of-the-art review of VR applications in OSC (VR–OSC) using the scientometric and systematic review methods. This study characterizes the synthesis between VR and OSC and identifies research trends and gaps that can be studied in future VR–OSC research. The scientometric review focuses on identifying the main topics of both research domains separately and combined based on the collected articles. The systematic review, meanwhile, qualitatively evaluates these articles, highlighting the existing research gaps and anticipating future research frontiers. The scientometric results indicate that VR applications in OSC can be organized into a number of clusters, such as Crane Operations and Onsite Planning, Educational Applications, Safety and Ergonomics, and Evaluation of Design Alternatives. The qualitative analysis identifies several future research directions to advance the field of VR–OSC, including (1) multiuser VR models in crane operation planning, (2) consideration of the role of human emotions in VR safety training by adopting biometric sensors, (3) decentralized web-VR platforms for remote OSC planning, and (4) VR-solutions for modeling robotic movements in OSC factories. This study can serve as a useful point of reference for VR–OSC researchers and provides a sound foundation for future research on VR–OSC.