Virtual Reality technology application: exploration study among house building companies in construction industry

Abstract

The virtual reality (VR) technology is an emerging technology that enables interactive real-time viewing of three-dimentional data. This technology is widely adopted in the western world, particularly for house building industry. It offered a wide range of benefit in the area of initial design, refining design ideas and marketing purposes. Despite these advantages, the technology has not been widely used in this country although Information Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure and government incentives have been given as part of country’s agenda. One of the dominant reasons is that a lack of knowledge regarding VR technolgy that lead to the very low usage of this technology in the industry. The main purpose of this study was to determine the perception of the industry players on the VR technology that led to three variation of perception. Firstly, the company who have a knowledge and used the technology before. Secondly, those who heard the technology but never used it before and thirdly from those who never heard of it and never used it in their project. An exploratory study was selected since the research is so new and vague in the industry. The study was conducted by using questionnaire survey sent to 200 house building companies. The findings revealed that the main factors that could be related to the poor usage of the technology in this country was due to the lack of skill workers, low involvement of client and availability of ICT internally. Although the industry acknowledged the benefits of using such a technology, the lack of trainings, courses and seminars on the area of VR hampered the usage of this technology in the industry.