TECH
Virtual Reality:
Reshaping the Office and Building Operations By: Brian Bollinger meteoric rise of Zoom, and other forms of telepresence, to the forefront of everyday life. According to the highest volume maker of VR headsets, Oculus, 2021 alone saw their number of users explode by some 7 million, rising another 90 percent above the already dramatic growth of 2020s pandemic lockdowns. Like Zoom, it would seem, VR is here to stay, shaping the ways we live and play, and increasingly, the ways we work. Of course, the commercial and residential real estate industries are no strangers to this technology: many consumers are already growing to expect the freedom to ‘tour’ in 3D or VR an apartment or office suite they want to rent from across the country or just across town. This reality has been driven by the democratization of “photogrammetry” scans made possible by companies like Matterport. Every morning I have the privilege of waking up and working out at some of the most exotic destinations on the planet: Crater Lake, Machu Picchu, remote beaches in New Zealand. My world-class coaches keep me on form with my boxing, pushing my heartrate into the 170s, as I slip, weave and land jabs, hooks and uppercuts to the tunes of Dizzie Gillespie, Steppenwolf and bands I’d never heard of until that morning. My jet-setting ways are only possible because I work out six days a week in Supernatural VR, a fitness program that rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, before being acquired by Meta and its virtual reality company Oculus. During the workday, while I do sometimes jump in my car and drive to one of our company co-offices around Atlanta, or travel to client sites, just as easily I can message one of my co-workers in Kansas City or Austin to see if they’d like to hit nine holes of golf while we talk through a project we’ve been working on together. Thanks to the PGA’s collaboration with TopGolf and developer Golf Scope Inc., we can step onto the tee box of famous courses like Wolf Creek and Valhalla in our wireless VR headsets using the Golf+ app, collaborating through something more rewarding than yet another Zoom call: bragging rights across the water hazard. It may be virtual reality, but it’s real life in today’s world. The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed the explosion of virtual reality, beyond specialty business and gaming niches, much like it saw the
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Insight • Issue 2, 2022
But an array of companies were already using VR to enhance workplace training before the pandemic, including giants like Walmart and UPS and even the NYPD, familiarizing employees with basic protocols and emergency scenarios. Brock McKeel, Walmart’s senior director of digital operations told CNBC back in 2019 “Life happens in 360, not 2D…. We test our associates on the content they see. Those associates who [used] VR as part of their training scored higher than those who didn’t.” Today, companies like 3M, Serious Labs and Aetos Imaging are releasing training experiences from fall protection and harness inspection to heavy equipment operations and even building equipment maintenance training, all in realistic virtual environments. In Aetos’ case, the virtual environments are literal, high-definition digital twins of their clients’ own buildings. “We believe that making it possible for companies to have their best people managing their facilities requires remote access to a version of their actual space, not just a generic model,” says Aetos President, Connor Offutt. When I interviewed him (on a golf course in VR) he elaborated that “we need to start looking at the communication barriers in the AEC space, and how we can adopt digital twin technology into the way we collaborate on projects.” Offutt describes a future in commercial real estate where institutional knowledge stays with a building, such as equipment training by the chief engineer embedded right into
