From Vision to Reality: Artificial Intelligence Design Assistant (AIDA) to facilitate Collaborative Design Processes

The failure to identify building design flaws in the early stages of hospital projects has led to costly remodeling and inefficient operations. This issue shows the importance of integrating professional operation feedback early in the design process, which is often hampered by poor communication and misunderstandings caused by traditional 2D drawings and abstract descriptions. To address these challenges, this R&D project focuses on using Virtual Reality (VR). The project builds on previous research on co-virtual environments, and introduces a new tool called the Virtual Collaborative Design Environment (ViCoDE). ViCoDE combines VR with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and a touchscreen to enable interactive and co-design review. This method has been proven to promote better and more efficient design process with shorter lead times.

However, results showed that participants were often unprepared and had difficulty adopting new guidelines and best practices. Nevertheless, they confirmed that VR and scenario-based review contributed to an efficient process where many errors were identified through joint scenario-based knowledge sharing. The project now focuses on exploring the use of AI as a user-interface to further support participants by helping, suggesting relevant scenarios and questions based on guidelines and best practices. By integrating an AI assistant into the VR environment, the project aims to create an intuitive and interactive user interface that can adapt to the specific needs of the project and users. This is expected to lead to more efficient planning processes, improved learning and care environments by making best practices and the knowledge base more accessible and understandable to users, thereby revolutionizing how the design of the buildings of the future is carried out through co-creative and collaborative processes supported by AI and VR, information structures.