From VR goggles on construction sites to the international research frontier

It all started with a simple question: Why is the construction industry still using traditional drawings when the digital building model contains all the information?

More than thirteen years ago, Mattias Roupé stood on a construction site in Gothenburg together with fellow researchers Mikael Johansson and Mikael Viklund-Tallgren and construction workers from Swedish construction company Peab. The researchers had brought an early, in-house-developed VR interface to showcase the project’s BIM model – a digital representation of the future building.

The reaction was immediate. With the VR solution developed at Chalmers, the construction workers could suddenly see the entire building around them. They could understand the context, identify problems and ask questions that drawings could never answer. They could also communicate what information they were missing and needed in order to work as efficiently as possible.

– It was an aha moment. That’s when we started asking ourselves why this information wasn’t already available to the people actually building the project,” says Mattias Roupé, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering.

That question laid the foundation for a research journey that has now placed Chalmers at the international research frontier as a leading research environment in digital construction and model-based production.

A model with untapped potential

BIM, or Building Information Modelling, emerged in the 2000s as a new way of representing buildings digitally. Unlike traditional CAD, which at the time represented the state of the art, BIM models contain intelligent objects with properties, relationships and detailed information that can be used throughout the construction process.

The vision was for the model to become the central information carrier in a construction project. But somewhere along the way, something happened. Despite the introduction of BIM, traditional drawings continued to dominate the construction process. The digital model was used primarily during the design phase, while production continued to work from two-dimensional documents.

– We realised that in practice, BIM had become a tool for producing drawings, rather than a new way of working,” says Mattias Roupé.

For the research group, a new research question began to emerge: What happens if you actually use the model to its full potential?

A new concept emerges

Over the following years, the researchers worked through the list of needs they had gathered in meetings with production staff. In 2020, they introduced the concept of Total BIM, driven by the need to distinguish this new way of working from established BIM practice.

Instead of allowing the model to coexist with drawings, the digital model was placed at the centre of the construction process as the shared source of information and communication platform – and with the model serving as a contractual document.

The concept of Total BIM became the starting point for several research projects and case studies. One of the first PhD students in the field, Oliver Disney, followed some of the Nordic region’s most advanced model-based construction projects to study how the approach affected production, communication and decision-making.

Through projects such as Celsius, Lumi, the Kaj16 office development in Gothenburg and the Glasblokkene hospital project in Bergen, the research group has been able to follow the development from early pilot projects to full-scale model-based production.

What makes the research unique is its focus on how BIM models are actually used in production – an area where the research literature remains limited.

–Historically, BIM has been used extensively in design. What we have managed to demonstrate is how the model can follow the project all the way into production and become an active part of the construction process,” says Mattias Roupé.

The result was some of the first scientific studies to empirically demonstrate that drawing-free construction projects were not only possible, but could also generate significant added value – in terms of the work environment, through improved communication and safer working conditions, as well as environmental and economic benefits through reduced material waste and lower final costs.

What a small number of previous international studies had identified as a theoretical possibility but a practical impossibility could, through Chalmers’ case studies, be demonstrated in real construction projects.

From the Nordic region to Stanford

Research by PhD student Shahin Sateei also clearly demonstrates how combining BIM with VR tools can enable professionals in fields such as healthcare and education to influence the design of their future workplaces for the better, already during the design phase.

VR makes it possible to experience walking around inside a BIM model, allowing professionals to use their specific expertise to test layouts, furnishing and flows in the future building in a realistic way.

In recent years, the research has attracted growing international attention. Today, the findings from the research projects are being used not only by Swedish companies but are also being discussed in international research contexts.

An ongoing collaboration with Stanford University is investigating how model-based approaches affect carbon calculations and life-cycle assessments in construction projects. The researchers are comparing traditional BIM projects with projects in which the model is used as a legally binding source of information – what the researchers refer to as Total BIM.

Previous results from Swedish projects indicate that access to quality-assured data in the model can transform the possibilities for carrying out carbon calculations, material analyses and decision support continuously throughout a project – a research question that has become increasingly relevant as demands for sustainability and climate reporting grow.

The next research frontier: AI and digital twins

As Total BIM has become an established research area, Mattias Roupé and his colleagues are already looking towards the next step. In ongoing projects, the researchers are investigating how a combination of AI and tools such as 360-degree cameras and drones can be used to monitor construction production in real time by generating a digital twin of the project.

– The vision is for the digital model not only to describe what the building is intended to look like, but also to automatically reflect how construction is actually progressing. Through AI-based image analysis and AI agents, deviations, work environment risks and production status can be identified automatically,” explains Mattias Roupé.

What began with a question about how BIM models could be used on construction sites has evolved into research on how artificial intelligence, digital twins and automated monitoring can transform the entire construction process.

For Mattias Roupé and his colleagues, the next research challenge is therefore no longer simply to digitise construction – but to create construction projects that can continuously improve themselves.

– It’s about moving from describing reality to continuously analysing and understanding it,” says Mattias Roupé.

Conference focusing on the same fundamental question

On 1 September, researchers and industry representatives will gather at Chalmers for "The Total BIM Day 2026" to learn from valuable experiences gained from construction projects in Sweden and Norway and to hear about the latest research.

The research idea that emerged on a construction site in Gothenburg has developed into an international research agenda that challenges established working methods in one of the world’s largest industries, but it is still driven by the same fundamental question: If all the information is already contained in the digital model – why do we still work as if it isn’t?

Read more (in Swedish!) about Total BIM Day and register here