The Use of Augmented Reality for Communication in Uncontrolled Construction Environment

The construction industry requires effective communication between project stakeholders in various locations. This communication can be facilitated by in-person site visits or phone calls. However, these traditional methods can lead to wasted travel time or the omission of critical visual site details. In theory, augmented reality (AR) can support consistent understandings of site environments in a similar way to in-person visits also with the efficiency of phone calls. Similar to the telestrator (i.e. video marker) seen during a football game, virtual content is overlayed over a real physical view of a space. While many studies explored the potential benefits of AR application for communication in controlled environments, they also mentioned the necessity to implement AR in uncontrolled environments. This dissertation’s main objective is to explore AR in live construction sites. First, this research explores literature through a comprehensive review to understand what has been documented in the literature: what shows consensus, what shows divergence among the existing studies, and understand the different contexts that would trigger challenges. Second, this research evaluates the utilization of augmented reality (AR) by exploring practitioners performing AR calls on field in real-time highway construction. During these trials, an on-site user engaged in an AR call with an off-site user. These calls were analyzed, and follow-up interviews were then conducted with the users to get a rich understanding of the users’ behaviors and perceptions. This field testing enabled the author to explore beneficial and challenging factors that affected the use of AR, categorize them, and identify ways in which AR technologies may, and may not, immediately support site-based communication for ongoing construction application. Third, this research establishes a decision-making framework that incorporates the advantageous and challenging factors outlined in paper 2. This framework considers various contextual factors and user behaviors related to the application in order to address and mitigate some of the challenges. This framework is given to users to test its content, comprehensiveness, and workflow. The framework is then updated and developed based on three rounds of Delphi panels to get a final consensus from users. The results of this dissertation offer a tool for users who never used AR on site before, support its use when it is effective, and avoid it when it is not.