State of the art BIM issue management systems (personal impression)

Clash detection and Issue Management have been a big hurdle for a while in the AEC industry (or it has been always an issue when human started to build houses. I'm not sure about this). Even after adopting the new technologies such as BIM or other IT techs, still the clash has occurred in the initial design, and still issues had to be managed and coordinated between different stakeholders in the project. As far as I can remember, Gehry Technologies (acquired by Trimble in 2014) and CASE (acquired by WeWork in 2015) handled this issue on their own way, doing it by building custom tools in individual project, or scaled it as a multi-project solutions. I'll talk about the Issue Management history in detail later.

When we agree that the issue management is not the thing we can get away from or something that we can eliminate from the AEC projects, we start to think how we can do it better then. So I searched, and found some nice solutions that can ease out our issue management hurdle. So today I would like to post some state of the art issue management solutions and some of my opinions to it.

1. Autodesk BIM360 Coordinate

Image courtesy of Autodesk

Features

• BIM models from different sources can be aggregated and visualized in the web browser
• Clash detection can be conducted from the web
• Identified clashes can be escalated into 'Issues' and shared with stakeholders for further discussion and to run resolution activities
• Providing collection of 3D navigation features called the 'Hypermodel' to ease the issue tracking
  - Place Me (provides camera view links to 3D model from 2D plan)
  - Locations (predefined camera view in 3D viewer)
  - Content Awareness (basically a collection of 3D view filters based on plans, levels, elements, element types, etc)
• Workflow configuration is possible for approval processes
• Detailed reports can be generated based on the clashes and issues

2. The Wild

Image courtesy of The Wild

Features

• Multi-users (up to 8 people) can collaborate in VR space in real-time
• Data from Autodesk BIM 360 can be streamed into the platform and used for the collaboration
• Supports multiple platforms - VR (HTC Vive, Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Windows Mixed Reality), desktop (macOS, Windows), AR(iOS)
• Provides native sketching and annotation tools
• Provides speech-to-text annotation feature

3. InsiteVR

Image Courtesy of InsiteVR

Features

• The most recent models from BIM 360 will be used automatically for the collaboration when linked once
• Supports multiple platforms - VR(HTC Vive, Oculus Quest, Oculus Go, Windows Mixed Reality), desktop(macOS, Windows)
• Provides speech-to-text annotation feature and synced to BIM 360 issues
• Automatically generates the PDF meeting reports with annotations and screenshots

My personal impression is that Autodesk BIM 360 seems to work as a hub for all sorts of AEC project data (not only BIM related) for coordination and issue management purpose. Since the VR/AR area hasn't been officially touched by Autodesk yet (surprisingly), the VR/AR collaboration service area seems to remain independent for a while. If BIM 360 dominates most of the AEC projects, however, the success of VR/AR collaboration highly depends on how well it is integrated with the hub.

The VR/AR collaboration seems to be the future of BIM coordination. With this, engineering companies and architecture firms won't have to relocate their specialists to on-site only to make them attend the BIM coordination meeting. The Wild's native sketching feature seems promising. I guess it can be applied in many cases (I started to imagine something like Minecraft Earth). It would be great if the 3D model created in The Wild's VR space can be extracted out and synced with BIM 360 (or something similar). I'm not sure if it is possible (please let me know). It is good to see that InsiteVR cares about the issue collection from the VR space, and automated report generation. Reporting is everything in the end (contractually).

References:
http://www.bimplus.co.uk/news/revizto-integrates-autodesk-bim-360-construction-m/
https://thewild.com/integrations/bim-360
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/bim-360/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/ENU/BIM360D-Design-Collaboration/files/About-Issues/GUID-306C0C68-34CE-4409-8C54-C769917BCB18-html.html
https://www.autodesk.com/bim-360/bim-collaboration-software-constructability-review/
https://www.insitevr.com/