A critical review of how eXtended Reality (XR) has addressed key factors influencing Safety on Construction Projects (fSCPs)

Published in Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, Vol. 31, pp. 2015–2048, 2024
DOI: 10.1007/s11831-023-10042-x

Abstract

The construction industry is known for its high accident rates. One hundred key factors affecting construction safety (fSCPs)—associated with general aspects of organisational management, materials and equipment, the construction site, and human aspects related to the worker and work team—have been identified. EXtended Reality (XR), which encompasses Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) technologies, is being used in construction safety management. XR offers multiple advantages, given its characteristics of visualisation, immersion, and interaction with digital models and real objects. XR’s potential safety uses are widely recognised, and several studies have tested these technologies for different applications. However, most such efforts have been focused on identifying functionalities, applications, and technological aspects of XR in general, rather than studying whether those uses affect the factors relevant to security management. This study examined the literature on XR experiences that have addressed fSCPs and analysed how these developments have been related to the construction sector’s methodologies and technologies, such as building information modelling (BIM).