VR and digital transformation of housing renovation

Over the last ten years or so, the construction industry has been undergoing a digital transformation that is far from uniform. This digital transformation is being driven by major new-build projects and large-scale refurbishments, and has therefore been designed by them and for them. The era of BIM (Building Information Modeling), a collaborative digital approach based around the building's digital twin, often produced in 3D, has been gradually taking shape over the last ten years, also in a non-homogeneous way. Because BIM and digital innovations have a cost, which today is borne mainly by the company, the prime contractor and the owner, and is therefore logically directed towards large-scale projects.

And yet, the vast majority of the construction market is made up of small-scale operations. These small-scale projects, and in particular routine renovation projects, have been left out of the digital transformation that has been taking place over the last ten years.

At the same time, we've seen the emergence over the last few years of 3D technologies, in particular virtual reality and scanning, which we'll be focusing on here. Virtual reality (also known by its acronym VR) is a technology that plunges users, in a more or less immersive way, into a digitally created artificial world [Futura Science definition]. 3D scanning is the 3D reconstruction of a space, acquired using specific equipment comprising one or more sensors, and assembled using a post-processing process.

The renovation market, particularly in housing, is therefore defined by this very characteristic: it's a colossal market made up of thousands of small (or even very small) work operations.