Elsevier

Automation in Construction

Volume 86, February 2018, Pages 150-162
Automation in Construction

A critical review of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) applications in construction safety

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2017.11.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • 90 VR/AR-CS related articles from 2000 to 2017 are reviewed

  • The review taxonomy was consolidated by technology characteristics, application domains, safety enhancement mechanisms, and safety assessment and evaluation

  • The top three application domains include hazards identification, safety education and training, and safety inspection and instruction

Abstract

Construction is a high hazard industry which involves many factors that are potentially dangerous to workers. Safety has always been advocated by many construction companies, and they have been working hard to make sure their employees are protected from fatalities and injuries. With the advent of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), there has been a witnessed trend of capitalizing on sophisticated immersive VR/AR applications to create forgiving environments for visualizing complex workplace situations, building up risk-preventive knowledge and undergoing training. To better understand the state-of-the-art of VR/AR applications in construction safety (VR/AR-CS) and from which to uncover the related issues and propose possible improvements, this paper starts with a review and synthesis of research evidence for several VR/AR prototypes, products and the related training and evaluation paradigms. Predicated upon a wide range of well-acknowledged scholarly journals, this paper comes up with a generic taxonomy consisting of VR/AR technology characteristics, application domains, safety scenarios and evaluation methods. According to this taxonomy, a number of technical features and types that could be implemented in the context of construction safety enhancement are derived and further elaborated, while significant application domains and trends regarding the VR/AR-CS research are generalized, i.e., hazards recognition and identification, safety training and education, safety instruction and inspection, and so on. Last but not least, this study sets forth a list of gaps derived from the in-depth review and comes up with the prospective research works. It is envisioned that the outcomes of this paper could assist both researchers and industrial practitioners with appreciating the research and practice frontier of VR/AR-CS and soliciting the latest VR/AR applications.

Introduction

Construction is a large, dynamic and complex sector that offers a large number of employment opportunities for millions of people worldwide [1]. However, fatal accidents in the construction industry tend to be higher than other sectors [2], for a long run, such a phenomenon has aroused a lot of safety concerns and discussions. Safety management, a method of manipulating on-site safety policies, procedures, and practices relating to a construction project, is one of the most frequently leveraged techniques to regulate construction activities and control risks [3]. Previous studies revealed that most accidents associated with construction undertakings were attributed to a lack of proactive and preventive measures such as workforce training, risk source identification and control, safety awareness and education, and so forth [4]. On the other hand, how effective these measures could work is subject to how much job-site knowledge could be solicited and how efficiently the knowledge could be absorbed [5], [6]. To this end, information visualization techniques such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR) Augmented Reality (AR), as well as other game engine-based Mixed Reality (MR) techniques, have been delved into to advance the current safety management practices [7], [8], [9], [10].

A long-established climate that safety is tied up with management has placed many construction firms and researchers' primary focus on cultural intervention, uptake of safety behaviors, organizational ideologies, espoused and enacted policies, communication and induction, and etc. [11], [12]. Meanwhile, a quick look through into VR/AR-CS publications helps identify that VR/AR technologies have been probed and tentatively implemented in various safety enhancement areas, such as risks identification, workforce training, skill transfer, ergonomics, and so on. Most studies have rationalized the development of a vast variety of VR/AR-CS systems for a safety enhancement purpose, and some studies have made efforts to summarize the VR/AR-CS. For example, Bhoir and Esmaeili [13] conduct an in-depth literature review to investigate the prevailing adoption rate of virtual reality environment to train workers regarding safety issues. And Guo et al. [14] examine the application of visualization technologies in construction safety and find that visualization technology can efficiently improve the safety training, facilitate job hazard area identification and accident prevention in a visual, interactive and cooperative way. However, they loosely compare how effectively these tailored technologies and systems, particularly for augmented reality and virtual reality, could be utilized to facilitate construction safety considering the disparity of evaluation method, technology characteristics, project types, scales, work complexity and other factors. Meanwhile, because the VR/AR-CS literature is found overwhelmingly diverse and vast, academia and industry may not be acutely aware of the authentic limitations and gaps in this area. Integration and classification of the reported literature within the VR/AR-CS domain may help them to gain a better understanding of the state-of-the-art and the related challenges. To cater to the industrial demands, additionally, it is also essential to have the most appropriate VR/AR devices, applications, systems, safety enhancement mechanisms and evaluation methodologies suggested. Therefore, the aims of this review are to address the aforementioned limitations and gaps through coming up with the most significant body of knowledge of VR/AR-CS and to drive the prospective research directions up to the most valuable and critical areas that the industrial and academic communities are adhering to.

Section snippets

An overview of VR/AR technologies and peripherals

Virtual reality (VR) simulation is to generate immersive environments from which users can experience unique insights into the way the real world works [15], [16]. The concept of VR was brought up over fifty years ago when the first immersive human-computer interaction (HCI) mock-up named “Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” was invented [17]. The formal term of VR was put up in 1989 [18]. Since then, several taxonomies have been raised by scholars to expound where a rigorous VR concept

Review methodology

This research leverages the content analysis-based review method [28]. This method has been a well-recognized method for reviewing and synthesizing literature and rationalizing outcomes, and been widely applied in the research field of engineering/construction management [29], [30]. Scopus and ISI Web of Science, the abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, were used to select a number of first-tier articles that are related to VR/AR-CS, from the authoritative and

Justification of publication quantity and contribution

Since the emergence of the first VR/AR-CS publication in 2000, the number of yearly publications remained at around 1.5 and was not observed a noticeable increase until 2008. From 2008, a significant increase of publications was witnessed, featuring an average amount of 8 papers per year till 2017 (Fig. 5). Among these journals, three construction-technology-themed journals (namely, AIC, JCCE and ITCon) are observed the highest amounts of publications, i.e., 30 for AIC, 12 for JCCE, 8 for

Implementation of critical review

As the review deals with numerous papers, it is important for the methodology to be predicated upon a rational taxonomy that can help direct the review focus and elicit the valuable findings into the area of research. This paper presents a review taxonomy consolidated by four specifications, namely, VR/AR technology characteristics incorporating input and output; VR/AR application domains in safety management; safety enhancement mechanisms; and safety assessment and evaluation (Fig.7).

Conclusion

VR/AR-CS has received a considerable amount of attention within the research and construction industry in the past two decades. This study has provided a critical review of the development of VR/AR-CS in the academic field, and hence, has established a solid platform for scholars and professionals to obtain useful insights into VR/AR-CS concerns. Research into VR/AR-CS has been conducted from different perspectives including (1) technology characteristics; (2) application domains; (3) safety

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Dr. Lei Hou for his guidance, comments,and suggestions on this research. This research was undertaken with the benefit of a grant from Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, The Thirteenth Five-Year National Key Research & Development Projects (Project No. 2016YFC0702005-04, 2016YFC0701600).

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