There’s the saying “seeing is believing.” This couldn’t be truer for Dura Vermeer. Putting on a VR headset and exploring a space before construction even begins isn’t a novelty for them. It’s an everyday part of their workflow.
According to Dura Vermeer, they discovered the technical barriers are much less than you might expect. They also found when people experience VR, they can truly see the real value and understand what it can do.
But how does VR actually help Dura Vermeer? With Autodesk Workshop XR, the company can bring safety even further to the forefront. They can complete more thorough design reviews to verify installations are positioned correctly and reduce on-site changes and clashes. For Dura Vermeer, virtual collaboration has brought a new level of visibility, understanding, and ease-of-use they couldn’t have previously imagined.
Founded in 1855, Dura Vermeer is a leading construction company in the Netherlands with nearly 3,000 employees and annual revenue of 1.8 billion euros. They have a strong commitment to innovation, and safety is the absolute top priority. The combination of these two important goals is evident with their use Workshop XR.
To prepare for a VR safety session, the construction team and safety coordinator work together to identify areas where risks are likely to arise. Using the 4D model, the team freezes a specific moment in time to highlight potential hazards. Once these moments are identified, they bring the model into Workshop XR via Autodesk Docs.
To make the simulation more realistic, they enhance the model with details such as equipment, temporary conditions, walking routes, construction logistics, safety zones, and work areas. During a virtual safety walk, participants can then step inside the model to see what a construction worker would experience on site, evaluate risks firsthand, and agree on measures to mitigate unsafe conditions before they occur.
Before Dura Vermeer adopted Workshop XR, it was time-consuming and difficult to use VR since it involved an intensive process with a game engine and rendering software. As a result, VR models were often unsynchronized, which reduced deployment and confidence in the source of truth. The upfront investment is also less now that they no longer need to rely on third-party applications and Meta Quest headsets are affordable.
“In the past it was very labor intensive, and we needed a lot of intermediate steps,” says Rick Boers, BIM manager, Dura Vermeer. “With Workshop XR, all those steps aren’t needed anymore. We can just open every model within our Autodesk Construction Cloud environment, and it’s so easy.”
“The use of Workshop XR ensures that the VR models keep pace with our biweekly cycle of providing aspect models to the BIM coordinator,” he adds. “We can open any model, including the update of the coordination model, in VR at the touch of a button. The risk that an old model is incorporated into VR is completely solved.”
—Rick Boers, BIM Manager, Dura Vermeer
The Netherlands is making a major switch sustainable energy. As part of this massive undertaking, transmission system operator TenneT will be connecting offshore wind farms to the electrical grid. With a new, innovative 2-gigawatt standard, the underground connections will run from the offshore platform through the North Sea and connect at new substations. The voltage will be transformed from 525 kilovolt to 380 kilovolts, making it suitable for the Dutch high voltage grid.
Dura Vermeer is leading the construction of land stations for TenneT. The ambitious infrastructure project is one of the first where they used Workshop XR and began to really see the results.
“The real potential of virtual reality is that you can experience it,” Boers says. “For the TenneT project, I can actually feel and see how big a land station really is. If I'm working next to a crane, for example, I can feel myself if things are unsafe in VR. Then we can make it safe before we’re even on the actual site.”
“We are always looking for new, innovative ways to make things safer,” he adds. “Workshop XR makes it very easy for us to implement into the daily work because of the experience that you get.”
Discover more about Workshop XR and try it for yourself today.
