Sweco
Unlocking clarity and collaboration with VR
Workshop XR Customer Success Story
In Kongsberg, Norway, growth is at a standstill—and it’s all because wastewater treatment is at maximum capacity. To create the opportunity for new buildings, apartments, and schools, the municipality took on an ambitious project to both renovate and expand their sole wastewater treatment facility.
The hurdles were daunting. Buildable space at the site is limited, and there are even stricter EU wastewater standards now. Sweco took on these challenges for the Kongsberg treatment plant to double the size of the existing facility and introduce new energy-efficient and chemical-reduced treatment systems. But, before construction even began, they pursued an innovative approach using VR with Autodesk Workshop XR to uncover even greater efficiencies and insights.
Stepping in the design
For the Kongsberg project and others, Sweco uses Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) and Workshop XR to identify issues, gain greater clarity, and collaborate even more seamlessly.
The team uploads models from ACC into Workshop XR and then explores them in VR. They can collaborate with operational staff on equipment heights, accessibility, and quality control. With so many overlapping elements for MEP installations, Workshop XR helps them clearly see the spatial order of installation and determine which components need to be built first.
“In ACC, you can create issues,” says Zinta Rize, Discipline Leader Mechanical/Process Engineering, Sweco. “You can point at a door, pipe, or pump and make a comment. Do you want to change or move it? You can do the same in Workshop XR, except you have spatial awareness. When you look at 3D models on screen, it looks like 3D. But it’s still so flat and doesn't give you the perspective that four meters is four meters. When you’re in VR, you can feel that ‘Oh, wow, that’s high.’”
Creating new global collaboration
The fact that the team can—quite literally—be anywhere during these virtual walkthroughs has created a new dynamic and additional time savings.
“The best part is that I don't have to be in the same room as you,” Rize says. “I can be in Oslo, or you can be in England. It doesn't matter—I can see what you're doing. It's like being on a site, it's magic. I'm just crazy about VR.”
