The wild ways VR is changing how buildings are designed

I’m hovering in the air, looking into an equipment-stuffed mechanical room on the roof of a high-rise. There’s a pipe running across the utility space and connecting down into the innards of the building’s plumbing system—and from this vantage point, it’s clear that something’s wrong. An elbow in the pipe is misaligned with those around it, and wherever the other end is going, it’s not going to match up with the intricate maze of pipes it takes for a tower to function. Floating in space and staring down this small but potentially disastrous flaw, I can just imagine the expense and effort it would take to fix it. Luckily, this building hasn’t been built, and what I’m looking at is just an elaborate digital mock-up.

This impossible view is made possible through virtual reality. I’m wearing a Meta Quest 3 VR headset, and touring a digital model of a demonstration building created by the architecture, engineering, and construction software giant Autodesk. The company is showing off Workshop XR, a new digital workspace for designers, engineers, and general contractors that creates an immersive way to inhabit the 3D digital models that are used to design and build pretty much any building of scale in the modern world.

The purpose of Workshop XR is to improve what’s known as design review, or the preconstruction double-checking that goes into identifying problems and refining designs before the first shovel hits the ground. The software creates a one-to-one digital version of the building that stakeholders can walk through virtually using VR headsets to experience the space more viscerally than they can when looking at a screen. They can also see when a pipe isn’t in the right place.

This type of view is becoming increasingly common in the development, design, and construction of buildings as the architecture, engineering, and construction community embraces “extended reality” (the “XR” in Autodesk WorkshopXR).