Employing Virtual Reality for Evaluating Infrastructure Conditions

Condition assessment, an important part as part of infrastructure evaluation, is a critical process for operations and maintenance to ensure a sustainable environment. However, condition assessment is often overlooked by some professionals in the construction industry. In this paper the role of virtual reality in condition assessment was examined from a construction industry perspective. A virtual experiment has been developed using VRTY software with integrated infrared thermographs of a road segment. The images were shared with construction professionals to determine its convenience and reliability using a survey. The feedback from 29 respondents highlighted the strengths and areas of improvement in the experiment. The analysis showed that: condition assessment is currently performed frequently by contractors, but clients only occasionally attend site visits; condition assessment documents are frequently viewed by the client, and it is important for clients to view them before making decisions about the project; the featured tool is convenient for viewing condition assessment outputs; and clients could highly trust results from the AR tool.