User involvement within health care with the help of Virtual Reality

We established our company three years ago and our focus has been architectural services and solutions and services for virtual reality. Over a year ago we started a strong partnership with FemEquity regarding user involvement when they announced the OpenBIM Studio concept, which is a cave solution that fits well into our product. And we have been working side by side ever since. Today I'm going to talk about user involvement in the AEC and specifically healthcare is the case I'm talking about today. And I'm talking about the use of full-scale mockups and the potential to do these full-scale mockups in virtual reality as an addition to the traditional processes. So the essential issue. As many of you may know, the science of virtual reality is very important. And design and construction only account for 2% of the total cost during a 30-year operational period. So when we are planning large scale projects, it is therefore imperative not only to optimize the design and construction costs, but even more the maintenance and personnel costs. And improved quality in employees' workplace and optimized workflows could help bring these costs down. And it's therefore a relatively important process to involve the people involved. And not just the users. As the experts in the design process in order to be able to create not only a beautiful and energy efficient building, but a building that fits the users' needs. As you may know, this model as well, is heavily used in the construction industry. But unfortunately we can't validate if the building actually fits the users' needs until it is built. Unless we create prototypes in some way, visualizations or 3D prints or mockups, which users can understand. For this purpose, full-scale mockups are sometimes being constructed, especially on large-scale projects. Sometimes even before the design has been made by the architect. But not every single square meter can be tested in a physical mockup. And some areas are simply too big to test because of the limitations of the physical test facilities. So if you don't want to realize a problem when it's very expensive or too late to change, virtual reality can be a good additional tool to ensure that more of the building is actually tested when it's still possible to make changes. For every building project, a lot of stakeholders have to be involved to achieve the ultimate goal. A building that meets the client's requirements, the users and the authorities. To be able to communicate between different professions, with different agendas, it requires a platform for information transaction that is understandable for all parties. And that's where the issue comes in. Traditionally, common users, for instance a future employee of a hospital, typically don't comprehend the traditional construction drawings. And mockups and other visualizations can help bring this kind of user to understand and enable them to give valuable input to consultants and decision makers. To get an understanding of how user involvement is facilitated through mockups, we have observed ongoing user processes and carried out a series of interview views with facilitators, users of different professions and consultants within the AEC on various Danish healthcare projects, to understand how they work in order to create an alternative in virtual reality. So what are we doing when we are creating full-scale mockups? When users are involved through mockups, a lot of artifacts are being used. As you can see in the pictures here, for instance a sink on the left, which is a cardboard box with markers drawn on it to illustrate that it's a sink. And some are more realistic than others. And of course you can't have the actual sink, because you have to have the entire library of all the furniture that goes into a hospital in a test facility like this. The rooms are created with cones, movable walls, or build up in simple materials like plywood. And the users place and move the artifacts around using the grid on the floor as a guidance. And in this way they can create several alternatives very rapidly. And sometimes even carry out small role plays. To test everyday scenarios and the work environment and stuff like that. And then sometimes to gain a perspective of things more than a room at a time, and relate single rooms to their surroundings, a magnet board game is being used. The board game allows the users to create floor plans of a specific area, and discuss pros and cons about the proposals. This board game is being used closely together with full-scale mock-ups in some cases. And whenever a change has been made in the board game, it is afterwards changed in the physical mock-up. In almost all cases, the bases for these mock-ups are either drawings or prints from requirements databases, or one of the two. Or a requirements database like Derofus. The output from the sessions are usually sketches, photos, videos of the final mock-ups, which are then to be implemented again in the CAHPS and the requirements databases. The mock-ups are not just being used for testing of the physical scale of the rooms, but also for logistics and organizational training. In this way, the future employees are getting prepared for their future workplace, before the workplace even exists. Additional to full-scale mock-ups, DNU, the new university hospital here in Aarhus, have been using large print-outs to prepare their users for the future workplace, using LEGO, men and women, as avatars to create small artifacts to be able to move them around in the rooms, so that they have a chance to get to know their surroundings and the new routines and technology that they have to adopt before moving into the new hospital. The potential of using virtual mock-ups as an addition to the existing processes is, in my opinion, huge. In virtual reality, we don't have a limitation on available artifacts. You can always just model the missing one without having to invest a lot of money in purchasing the equipment. We don't really have the same limitations on our test facilities as we do with the physical build mock-ups as well. And we can potentially reuse our BIM data, and create time-cost effective virtual mock-ups based on the already modeled geometry. We can re-implement our user involvement results directly into our BIM tools, instead of having to manually transfer sketches into our tools after the sessions are done. And this is something the building owners like to hear. Users can participate in user involvement sessions from anywhere, and won't necessarily have to spend time on transportation back and forth to the test facilities. And of course, we utilize the game engine Unity as well. So, as we're in the gaming world, we can benefit from gamification, and put in quests onto our models, and benefit from that in testing our wayfinding and stuff like that. And finally, we can make the results of a user session involvement available for the coworkers who weren't able to be there at the test day on a trial solution. If not more, virtual mock-ups can most certainly complement the existing processes. So this is the background. So, we have been... In order to achieve the potential of facilitating user involvement in virtual reality, we have been reworking the workflows, and used the empirical data to analyze which system demands we have in order to be able to facilitate mock-ups in virtual reality. And... A system to facilitate user involvement in virtual reality, should of course support multiple users in real time. You can't just let a user into a virtual environment on his own, and not be able to interact with other people, because that's a very important part of the process. And... We have to enable users to co-create the mock-ups, because that's also a very important part of the sessions. And let them be able to interact with and manipulate the world, as they do with the artifacts in the physical mock-up. Of course, we also have to be able to give the users an experience that duplicates the one-to-one experience they get in the physical mock-up. That's a no-brainer in virtual reality. And enable them to interact with people in order to support scenario testing and role-playing. And then, from the facilitator's perspective, it's important that they have some sort of way to spectate the different users that are connected to the virtual mock-up, so that they can gain knowledge about how the users interact with this particular room, or this particular area. And then of course, and that's something... The first question I get from every consultant I speak with, how can we get the data out and into our CAD tools again? So in order to be able to facilitate these processes in virtual mock-ups instead of physical mock-ups, we have combined three technologies. We combine touch screens, which allows us to show planned use, and allow users to co-create rooms or areas or whatever they are doing. Head-mount displays, like the ones you just tested over here, to be able to explore and interact and to enable work process testing with multiple users. And then, the last part, and not least, caves, which is very optimal for group discussions and validation of work processes of other users, which of course also can be used to explore the virtual model. So the key functionalities of the system are multi-touch interaction for co-creation and real-time multi-user environment, which allows users to explore and test the mock-up simultaneously. We have been, up until recently, working with the Oculus Rift and the OpenDemo Studio and from the bankruptcy, and all non-computers with built-in multi-touch functions, but now we also support Android and iOS, and as one of the previous presenters said, it's much more acquirable if you can just bring a tablet like this and use this as a co-creation device. So whenever a project is opened from one of the three device types, whether it's a mobile device or not, the content is synchronized between them. And if an artifact is spawned on the touch device, it would immediately show on the head-mount display and the cave, because it's connected to a cloud solution. So we emulate what's going on in the physic mock-ups. The system is still undergoing development, but the workflow will be simplified as follows. We bring in our models, we set up the potential scenarios, and set up the lighting and materials and whatnot. And then we, in one click distribution, send them up to the cloud, which then will enable the different devices to open up the models. Here we have a photo of the setup with the all-in-one computer Oculus Rift and the right side of the picture in the cave in the front. As you can see, there are two users inside the virtual mock-up at the moment, which are able to interact with each other. On the touchscreen, users can manipulate the floor plan, place artifacts, and watch the head-mount display user's position. You can see the avatars on the floor plan as well, which is helpful for the user. This is all from the facilitator's perspective. And you can also spectate them in the cave, as you can see in this image. Users in the head-mount displays can see each other and use the laser pointer or the arm, the virtual arm, to point and illustrate what they're talking about to the other users, and manipulate objects by moving their hands in front of them and actually touching the virtual objects. In the same way as we saw before, the users are able to interact with the mock-up and rapidly create a series of alternative proposals. And as I said, but now they don't have to be present, so if we have an expensive surgeon or something, he could actually participate from his office. And that's a huge benefit. The system is in part already being used, by the Danish Building and Property Agency on the renovation of the Panem Institute. They're using the cave exclusively at the moment, but are already interested in the rest of the stuff we do. And as I said before, the system is still under development, but we are looking for companies who are interested in the potentials and want to become test partners. In my opinion, virtual reality is finally here, as we saw in the mass-production, and the last slide has been a long way coming. And I think the building industry has a lot to benefit from this. And as a final remark, I'd like to point out that you're more than welcome to try our system. We brought a small part of it. Of course, we couldn't bring the cave. But actually, it's located in the Navitas building until late June. So if you want to test out the entire system as a whole, we could arrange a demo. Thank you very much. Any questions? Yeah? So how do people react when they try and interact in virtual reality? There's so much missing on the facial gesture and talking. So how do they react? Yeah, there's no facial recognition or transmission of voice yet. That's, of course, a tempting way to go. But I think the social part of virtual reality is actually very important, especially in these type of cases. And that's also what we hear from the users who are trying this. If they stand next to each other and they are walking in another dimension, they find it very fitting to be able to interact. At the same time, in a virtual model. It also gives us the possibility to test out different scenarios, which wouldn't be possible if a single user was just moving around all by himself. A lot of work processes is going on in a collaboration between people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do people react when they have these goggles on and people like Tappet start manipulating the surroundings? They find that very cool. Some people get a little scared at first. Yeah, because yesterday there was the main issue using these VR goggles is that people easily get dizzy. Yeah. Yeah. You have to really... Be careful about how you put together your system. It totally ruins the process if you take in too large a model for your hardware, because then the users will most definitely get sick. So you have to balance out what you're doing, and especially if you are using mobile devices, you have to know your limits. But sometimes it's not necessary to have the entire project in a virtual model. But that's a balance you have to keep in mind. All right. Thanks a lot.