Augmented Reality for Timber AEC

Augmented reality has the power to revolutionize the AEC sector, improving performance and increasing the possibilities for viewing and interacting with information.

In recent years we have heard a lot about these new emerging technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.
At Ergodomus we love to push the boundaries and therefore we decided to know more about augmented reality, as in our opinion it has a great potential in many different work/professional/business applications. It also has the advantage of keeping contact with the “surrounding world” without being totally immersed in another environment as it happens instead for virtual reality.

Augmented reality was already added in 2005 by the consulting firm Gartner in its famous Hype Cycle diagram. It then went through all the development stages until reaching the plateau of productivity and then placing it on the market in 2019/2020.

Ergodomus invests hundreds of hours every year in innovative R&D projects and our computational design department has been working on AR for months so far: the results are amazing and therefore we recently added this technology to our workflow.

When it comes to design a complex connection or to understand the behavior of a structure, then AR is the best choice to avoid problems on site and to value engineer the project. We’re still working on the project, involving some other partners/developers to improve the workflow and the ease of use. It’s going to be a long process but we are very optimistic and we feel we’re getting close to the “final version” day by day.

Mass Timber Connection in AR

For a big office building, we had to engineer some huge connections between many different members with different sizes and orientations. It was very hard to be sure that everything works and therefore we used the AR technology to “see” on scale 1:1 the connection as we were using x-ray. It’s clear that the connection is big compared to me and my colleagues!
Just to give you an idea the main beam is 400mm wide and 1280mm deep, while the column is 400mm X 480mm!

Structural Analysis in AR

To engineer a 16-storey building is a pretty hard job. For the structural analysis, we used the AR to better understand the deformation of the building when hit by an earthquake.

Assembly Plans in AR

During the construction stage, in addition to the usual assembly drawings, it was also used an augmented reality application to speed up the assembly of the structure and avoid assembly mistakes. Once installed on the smartphone, the app gave the assemblers the possibility to virtually see the elements of the structure along with their label.

AR in real-time on a 6-Storey Mass Timber building’s construction site

For this large-scale construction project, we leveraged a cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) system in real-time to visualize and test assembly plans on-site. This immersive AR technology allowed us to preview the final structure in 1:1 scale, functioning almost like an X-ray to identify and avoid clashes and penetrations effectively. The benefits of AR are tangible across the project’s lifecycle, enhancing precision and functionality, as demonstrated in our video.

To discover more about this challenging project, visit the dedicated page!

We summarized some advantages of this technology here below:

• 1:1 scale visualization and interaction of parts of structural parts or even entire buildings.
• Involvement of customers by sharing the application to view the model in AR.
• More effective communication of the solutions and results of structural analyses.
• A different way to see the stresses/forces on the load-bearing elements.
• Much easier ways to show workers on site how to assembly the elements.