Evaluating the use of virtual reality for maintainability-focused design reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase can account for as much as 80% of the overall lifecycle cost of a project. The inputs from O&M practitioners are often not incorporated during the design phase leading to maintainability issues during the O&M phase, which results in significant costs and hinders building performance. Traditionally, design communication with practitioners is conducted using 2D drawings and in some more advanced projects, with Building Information Models (BIMs). Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to facilitate maintainability-focused design input from O&M practitioners, but this application has not been studied in detail. This paper addresses the gap by examining the usability of VR for providing access-related maintainability inputs. A quasi-experimental approach was adopted to evaluate the difference in access-related inputs provided by sixteen O&M practitioners, once using 2D drawings and BIM and again using VR. We assessed the variation in time for O&M practitioners to provide the inputs and the perceived quality of the inputs using the two design communication methods. We also examined the effect of practitioners' years of experience on providing access-related maintainability inputs using VR. The results suggest that there was no statistically significant difference in the access-related maintainability inputs provided using the two design communication methods, which demonstrates that O&M practitioners could provide similar access-related inputs using VR and traditional means of communication using 2D drawings and 3D models. The results also show that O&M practitioners were able to provide inputs significantly faster using VR. The O&M practitioners also reported that VR facilitated ease of use and high confidence in their inputs. Furthermore, the practitioners' years of experience did not lead to any variation in the access-related inputs provided and the time efficiency of providing the inputs. While the small sample size limits the generalizability of the results, the study acts as a proof of concept on the usability of VR for improving O&M practitioner input on the maintainability of building designs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.065 | 0.236 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".