n-D Virtual Environment in Construction Education

The 21st century’s information technology has proven an untapped resource for construction engineering and technology classrooms. As the modern-day student becomes more epitomized with a passion for the interactivity of the mouse and keyboard, it has become essential that the classroom offer an engaging method of learning. Construction industry in today’s world is becoming enormously complex as project sizes are increasing and project duration are decreasing. At the same time designers are conceptualizing ever-complex designs, which no longer can easily be comprehended by 2D drawings. Despite the excellence of enthused educators and various textbooks, the associated rigorous theories and rhetoric make it a tedious academic hurdle for numerous students. Traditional approaches of understanding construction processes through field trips have always been hindered by logistic difficulties. In addition to the risks involved with these field trips, designated sites may not be at the particular stage of construction during the academic semester to demonstrate the multiple facets within a short duration of the trips. However, using multidimensional (n-D) visualizations, animations, virtual reality and walkthrough of various structures in virtual environment students receive the understanding absent from the traditional approach. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate various design and construction visualization techniques in desktop virtual environments including image visualization, virtual reality, design animation, walk-through, time-space relationship visualization in 4D (3D+Schedule), and time-space-cost relationship visualization in 5D (3D+Schedule+Cost). The techniques demonstrated through virtual models can potentially be valuable tools not only in the classroom lectures, but also as effective learner-centred self-directed tools.