VIRTUAL INTEGRATED DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION

Recent surveys in the construction industry (e.g. Egan Report (1)) show that significant value improvement and cost reduction can be gained by substantially integrated solutions being applied by project teams as a mean of reengineering the project process. In particular, these surveys show that there are considerable benefits to be gained by integration of the "design" and "construction" processes. After a brief presentation of potential applications of Virtual Reality (VR) in the construction industry, the paper will focus on the issue of "collaborative virtual prototyping". In particular, the research carried out in the frame of the CAVALCADE 1 project, funded under the European ESPRIT programme (HPCN 2 domain), will be presented. Special emphasis will be put on the concurrent engineering features of CAVALCADE allowing project teams, based in geographically distant locations, to collaboratively design, test and validate shared virtual prototypes. As a conclusion, the objectives of new IST project (DIVERCITY 3 - Distributed Virtual Workspace for enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry) that will build, among others, on the results of CAVALCADE, will then be presented.