The Construction Sector Deal underlines key policies, set by the government, that need to be achieved by the construction industry in the next few years.
The government is encouraging companies to invest money into research and development, through providing tax incentive such as tax credit towards these investments. This is all to push the development in technology to improve necessary issues of the construction industry. The aims set out are:
- Technical Education System, £406 million towards pushing STEM skills
- 33% reduction in the cost of construction
- 50% reduction in time taken to complete a build
- 50% reduction on greenhouse gas emissions
- Digital technologies brought into all phases of construction
- Deliver 1.5 million homes by 2022
- Improve the health and safety in construction
- Produce machine-readable product information
- A further and more extensive use of BIM (Building Information Modelling)
- Improvement in energy generation and storage
- Generate good jobs and greater earning powers
- Increase diversity in the construction industry, amongst ethnicity, gender and disability
- Improve life time performance of buildings
Construction is one of the least digitalized industries however this is in the process of changing. Due to the major investment in research and development of technologies, this is evidence that within a few more years Virtual Reality will become more accessible. This will be a great achievement to reach since it can help the construction industry, with Virtual Reality, we can help push towards these key ideas that are desired.
For example, the main requirement is to speed up the construction process and develop a building that will have a longer lifespan. With VR we can put a design under more intensive testing before it is built which will allow for less mistakes to be made, and on the construction site the builders, due to being able to walk through a virtual model of the building, there will be less miscommunications, so that the builders know exactly what is required from the design. This, in turn, will speed up the construction process, since there will be less delays from a lack of understanding and there will be less mistakes made by the architects since the virtual model will go under extensive testing.
There is increasing thought about how a building makes a person feel in a space, poor quality buildings can impact a person's well being and mental health, so through the use of VR we can test how a person reacts to a space, almost predict their emotions so there is a smaller chance of building a poor quality of space.
DISCUSSION POINT
It could be argued that this push in technology could lead to a lack of jobs, since eventually there could be the possibility of feeding information straight to a machine that then can process the information and build the design. However, this could lead to the disappearance of individuality in design.
Edited by Annabel West
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