Holographic Construction

Abstract

We present a method for generating holographic construction information from parametric models. Holographic models replace 2D drawings and templates with unambiguous, contextual, shared and interactive design information. We show that our method enabled a team of expert bricklayers to complete a section of wall in a fraction of expected construction time and within typical tolerances, measured through comparative analysis of digital models to 3D point cloud scans of as built conditions. 1 Background Computer aided design and manufacturing has afforded architects more control over fabrication processes and brought about the possibility of generating construction information directly from design information (Kolarevic 2003). However, the limited ability to interfere with digital fabrication processes during their operation has inhibited adaptable, flexible, intuitive and reactive approaches to materialising buildings and exacerbated the distinction between the practices of designing and making. In response to these concerns, researchers have focused on improving the capacity of industrial robots to sense and learn from their material environments (Menges 2015), though the computer vision systems required for industrial robots to negotiate typical building sites and work with human construction teams present significant challenges (Dörfler et al. 2016). Take the particularly prevalent fascination with variable brick structures and the automation of their construction within the discourse of the digital design community. While the construction of structures from brick by robotic arms can be automated within laboratory environments, these same robots perform poorly on construction sites where mortar viscosity is unpredictable, detritus turns up in unexpected locations and construction workers tend to get in the way. Bricklayers attempting to construct variable brick structures require templates that are expensive, wasteful and labour intensive (Yuan et al. 2013). Mixed Reality (Milgram and Kishino 2004) environments lend themselves well to non-standard bricklaying as taking physical measurements to determine brick locations can be replaced with a single set out of the entire holographic model relative to the physical construction site. (Fazel and Izadi 2018).