Visualization and information: a building design perspective

Virtual reality (VR) packages offer good visualization capabilities but inadequate facilities for either internal data management or data exchange with other packages. The potential usefulness of VR packages for industrial and business applications is limited by their lack of support for the manipulation of specialist information. Their generic nature cannot retain the complex semantics and syntax of industrial information. Within the iterative process of building design and visualization, support is required for construction industry data, which is ordered in a complex and domain specific manner. Improved transfer of data from specialist building design tools to virtual reality has been investigated in previous research, but in this paper it is argued that data transfer is not enough. Virtual reality techniques need to become available within the specialist buildings design tools and alter the interface to such applications.