What I told architects at Facilities Management Expo about VR

Twenty minutes, Hall A, 13:30

The invitation was straightforward: “Dear architects and friends, you are welcome to Facilities Management Expo. Topic: Virtual Reality in Facility Management. Session: Technology in the FM Sector. 11 May 2022, 13:30 to 13:50, Main Conference Venue, Hall A.” Twenty minutes, straight after lunch, to a room whose day job is keeping buildings running.

I knew the risk. In 2022 “virtual reality” still meant headsets and games to most of the room, and “facility management” meant work orders, chillers and cleaning contracts. Putting the two words together sounded like a sales pitch from somebody who had never had to fix a lift on a Friday.

So I decided not to talk about headsets at all for the first ten minutes. I talked about a problem every person in the room had: you are responsible for a building you cannot see all of at once, full of equipment whose history lives in a filing cabinet, maintained by technicians who are never in the right place when something fails. Then I asked what would change if you could stand inside the building without being in it, and if the building could tell you what was wrong with it.

The talk was recorded and is still on the video platforms under my name, delivered in a slightly faster voice than I would use today. Here is the structure of it, updated with what we have learned in the years since.

Start with visualisation: walk the building before you visit it

The first benefit I put on the screen was the least glamorous and, I think, the most important: 3D model integration and virtual walkthroughs for planning.

Most facility managers inherit a building as a set of drawings — often out of date, often in three different formats — and a spreadsheet of assets. Bringing the building into a navigable 3D model gives a comprehensive and detailed picture of how space is actually used: which corridors are dead, where the plant rooms really are, which ceiling void is already full of ducting. Better planning starts with better seeing.

Virtual walkthroughs extend that into operations. A manager responsible for a hospital campus, a university or a chain of branches can identify potential issues and plan maintenance activities without being physically present on site. In 2022 this was still a “wouldn't it be nice”. Today it is exactly what we deliver as a digital twin: a scanned or modelled replica of the facility that can be walked on a laptop, a phone or a headset, with asset data attached to the geometry.

I told the architects that they were already halfway there. They produce the models. What FM needed was for those models to stop dying at handover.

AR on the asset, MR for the expert who is somewhere else

The second block was maintenance and operations, and this is where the room leaned forward, because it is where the money is.

Real-time data overlay. Augmented reality can place live information on top of the physical asset: equipment status, maintenance history and operational guidelines, floating next to the pump or the panel the technician is standing in front of. No tablet menus, no walking back to the office for the manual. The building documentation becomes visible where it is needed.

Remote assistance. Mixed reality lets an expert who is in Amman guide a technician who is in Riyadh through a complex task, seeing what the technician sees and drawing instructions into their view. That reduces downtime and travel costs, and it is the single benefit I would tell any FM company to pilot first, because the saving shows up in the first month: one specialist, many sites.

I also mentioned digitised documentation — using AR to visualise building records rather than storing them in a cabinet — because half the cost of a maintenance call in this region is finding out what was done last time. These are the ideas we later wrote up in more detail in VR, AR and MR for facilities management.

Training, safety and the emergencies you cannot rehearse for real

The third block was training and safety, and here virtual reality earns its place without argument. You cannot set fire to a shopping mall to practise evacuating it. You cannot flood a plant room to see whether the team isolates the right valve. But you can do both in VR, in the actual building layout, as many times as it takes.

Interactive training simulates real-life scenarios and emergencies and improves the team's preparedness and response times, because they have already made the wrong decision three times in a headset before they have to make the right one in a corridor full of smoke. Safety protocols and evacuation plans stop being laminated posters and become something staff have physically walked through.

This is the same reason we build VR training simulators for industrial and healthcare clients: the dangerous, expensive or rare situations are exactly the ones worth rehearsing virtually. In FM the list is long — confined-space entry, working at height on a façade, a generator changeover during a blackout — and the cost of getting one of them wrong once is higher than the cost of the whole programme.

Simulate the decision, then connect it to the building

The last two blocks were about decision-making and integration, and I remember rushing them because the clock in Hall A was unforgiving. They deserve more space.

Scenario simulation. Before you reconfigure a floor, move a department or spend on an energy-saving measure, you can run the scenario in the model. Emergency evacuations, space reconfigurations and energy-saving measures can all be simulated and compared, which turns an argument between two managers into a comparison between two results.

Predictive maintenance. When the twin is fed with asset data, you can visualise potential failures and required interventions rather than discovering them. Asset management and lifecycle planning become things you can see, which is the only way most boards will fund them.

Integration with the BMS. This was my closing point and it is the one I would underline hardest today. An immersive model that is not connected to the building management system is a beautiful brochure. Connected, it becomes a unified platform for monitoring and controlling the building's functions — the place where the facility's live data, its documentation and its people meet. It also improves the conversation with the client: you can present facility layouts, planned changes and maintenance schedules in a form they can actually understand, and they can experience proposed changes and give feedback before anything is built.

What the room asked, and what has changed since

The questions afterwards were the right ones. How accurate does the model have to be? (Accurate enough for the task: a wayfinding twin and a maintenance twin are different animals.) Who owns the data? (The building owner, always; the platform is a tool.) And the one every FM company asks: what does it cost compared with just sending a technician? (Less, as soon as you have more than a handful of sites or one genuinely dangerous procedure.)

What has changed since is mostly that the tools caught up with the talk. We now deliver digital twins as a service rather than a concept, including a complete digital-twin campus for a Jordanian university, and the conversation in Saudi Arabia has moved from “what is a digital twin” to “how do we run facilities management for a giga-project with one”. We wrote about that shift in digital twins for Saudi giga-projects.

If I gave the talk again I would change one thing. I would spend less time on the headset and more time on the handover — the moment the architect's model is either archived or becomes the operating system of the building for the next thirty years. That decision is made by the people who were in that room, and it is still the most important one.