Building information modeling

Building information modeling (BIM, also spelled building information modelling) is the creation and management of a shared digital representation of a building or other built asset, holding both its geometry and the data that describe its parts, for use across design, construction and operation. The United States National BIM Standard defines a building information model as "a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility" that serves as a shared knowledge resource and a basis for decisions during the facility's life cycle. The international standard ISO 19650 treats BIM as a stage of maturity in information management for built assets.

In architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), BIM models supply the content for many virtual reality and augmented reality tools. VR tools let design teams walk through a model at full scale before it is built, and AR and mixed reality tools overlay the model on the real construction site to check installed work against the design. Products built on this idea include Trimble Connect for HoloLens and the Trimble XR10 hard hat, IrisVR Prospect, Autodesk Workshop XR for Meta Quest headsets and the XYZ Atom.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked the NBIMS-US, BSI, ISO 19650-1 and ISO 16739-1 descriptions, the 1974 BDS report, the Revit acquisition, Autodesk, IrisVR, Trimble, XYZ Reality and UploadVR product statements, and the six cited papers against their abstracts or full text. About review dates.

Definition

The National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), which publishes the National BIM Standard-United States (NBIMS-US), states that early definitions asserting that BIM "is simply a 3D model of a facility" are "far from the truth". It refers to "digital, object-based, interoperable building information modeling processes and tools", and its definition stresses that the model is a shared resource used to make decisions from a facility's inception onward. BSI, the British standards body, describes building information modelling as "the process of creating and managing information for a built asset".

A BIM model carries property information alongside its geometry. In their 2018 review, Wang and colleagues describe that information as the data a building project needs through its whole life cycle (design, planning, construction, operation and maintenance), and note that users of BIM-enabled VR can work with factors such as cost and material type while inspecting the design, rather than reading 2D drawings.

History

In September 1974, Charles Eastman and colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University's Institute of Physical Planning published a research report outlining the Building Description System (BDS). The report argued that many costs of design, construction and building operation came from relying on drawings as the record of a building, and proposed as a replacement a computer system for storing and manipulating design information, in which a building is treated as the spatial composition of a set of parts. BDS was to provide graphic entry of element shapes, an interactive graphic language for arranging elements, perspective or orthographic drawings produced from the data, and sorting of the database by attributes such as material type or supplier.

In April 2002 Autodesk completed its acquisition of the privately held Revit Technology Corporation for US$133 million in cash (the transaction closed on 1 April), describing Revit as "parametric building technology for building design, construction, and management".

Part 1 of the first version of the US national standard (NBIMS-US Version 1) is dated December 2007. ISO 19650-1:2018, the first part of the international ISO 19650 series on information management using BIM, was published in December 2018 by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 59/SC 13. The second edition of ISO 16739-1, which standardises the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) data schema used to exchange BIM data between applications, was published in March 2024 as ISO 16739-1:2024; it corresponds to IFC 4.3.

Standards

Standard	Publisher	Published	Scope
NBIMS-US Version 1, Part 1	National Institute of Building Sciences	December 2007	Overview, principles and methodologies of the US national BIM standard
ISO 19650-1:2018	ISO (TC 59/SC 13)	December 2018	Concepts and principles for information management at the maturity stage the series calls "building information modelling (BIM) according to the ISO 19650 series", over the whole life cycle of a built asset
ISO 19650 series (parts 1-5)	ISO	From 2018	Concepts and principles, asset delivery phase, asset operational phase, information exchange, and security
ISO 16739-1:2024 (IFC 4.3)	ISO (TC 59/SC 13)	March 2024	Open data schema for BIM information exchanged between software applications; this edition added infrastructure such as bridges, roads, railways, waterways and ports

Data exchange for VR and AR

XR design-review products typically load models from BIM authoring and coordination software. Autodesk lists Revit, Navisworks and IFC files as the inputs for Workshop XR. IFC is the vendor-neutral route: ISO describes ISO 16739-1 as "an open international standard for information used in Building Information Modeling (BIM)" that is exchanged among the software applications of the various participants in a construction or facility management project.

Complex models can need preparation before they run well in a headset. In a 2019 workflow for the Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament, researchers translated heritage BIM models of six spaces into Unity scenes, optimising the geometry to VR performance guidelines while keeping visual fidelity. They reported that existing software for viewing BIM in VR headsets was inadequate for complex heritage models and lacked support for custom educational content. See also Virtual heritage.

Applications in VR and AR

The 2020 research agenda by Davila Delgado, Oyedele, Demian and Beach, based on workshops and questionnaires with 54 experts from 36 organisations, grouped AR and VR use in AEC into six use cases: stakeholder engagement, design support, design review, construction support, operations and management support, and training.

Virtual reality design review

In December 2017, AEC Magazine reported that Autodesk's Revit Live 2.0 used a cloud service to optimise Revit models and structure their BIM data into interactive models that could be viewed in VR on an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.

VR design review uses a head-mounted display to place one or more users inside the model at full scale. IrisVR made Prospect, design review and collaboration software for VR aimed at AEC firms. In 2018 it added a beta plugin that opened Autodesk Navisworks models in VR with one click, so that teams could review models at true scale and check clashes visually. On 24 March 2022 Autodesk announced an agreement to acquire The Wild, a cloud-connected XR platform for AEC professionals to present, review and collaborate on projects, which also included IrisVR. The release said the two products pull data from AEC tools including Autodesk BIM 360, Autodesk Build, Revit, Navisworks, Rhinoceros and SketchUp, and quoted Autodesk chief executive Andrew Anagnost saying that "XR is a must-have business imperative for today."

Autodesk's current product for this is Workshop XR, which the company describes as a shared workspace in which AEC teams review 3D models together in extended reality, with models and synced issue data coming from Autodesk Forma. It runs without a PC connection on Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S and Meta Quest Pro headsets, with a browser-based web app for participants without a headset, and Autodesk names it as the product that customers of The Wild and Prospect by IrisVR are migrating to.

On-site augmented and mixed reality

On-site AR registers the BIM model to the physical building so that workers can compare what has been built with the design. On 25 January 2018 Trimble released Trimble Connect for HoloLens through the Microsoft Windows App Store. Trimble said it combined models from multiple stakeholders such as structural, mechanical and electrical trade partners and provided "precise alignment of holographic data on a 1:1 scale on the job site". The same announcement introduced a hard hat solution for Microsoft HoloLens, expected in the first quarter of 2018, for sites with strict safety requirements; Trimble developed it with Microsoft around an ANSI-approved hard hat. On 25 February 2019 Trimble announced the XR10 with HoloLens 2, a hard hat-compatible device for workers in "safety-controlled environments", saying the full solution gave front-line workers "even greater accessibility to 3D models". Microsoft confirmed to UploadVR on 1 October 2024 that Microsoft HoloLens 2 production had ended, with updates for critical security issues and software regressions continuing until 31 December 2027.

Handheld AR brought the same workflow to phones and tablets. Trimble Connect AR, announced on 26 October 2021, runs on Android and iOS tablets and smartphones and lets users visualise 3D BIM models in the real world. To position the model, a network of QR code markers generated in Trimble Connect is placed around the jobsite, either with a Trimble robotic total station or manually, after which users can compare as-built work with the design, measure between real and virtual objects, and share AR screenshots for requests for information and punch lists. See also Fiducial markers and Mobile AR.

In November 2021 AEC Magazine reported the launch of the Atom by XYZ Reality, an "engineering grade" hard hat AR headset "said to offer millimetre precision" for positioning 3D models on site, so that teams can inspect the model in place and identify clashes before installation.

Products

Product	Vendor	Date	Platform	BIM role
Revit Live 2.0	Autodesk	December 2017 (version 2.0 reported)	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift	Cloud conversion of Revit models into interactive VR models
Trimble Connect for HoloLens	Trimble	25 January 2018	Microsoft HoloLens	Combines trade models and aligns them at 1:1 scale on the job site
Trimble XR10 with HoloLens 2	Trimble	Announced 25 February 2019	Microsoft HoloLens 2 in a hard hat	Access to 3D models by front-line workers in safety-controlled environments
Trimble Connect AR	Trimble	26 October 2021	Android and iOS phones and tablets	Marker-aligned BIM overlay for clash checks and as-built verification
Atom	XYZ Reality	November 2021	Hard hat AR headset	Millimetre-precision placement of 3D models on site, as reported
Prospect and The Wild	IrisVR and The Wild	Autodesk acquisition announced 24 March 2022	VR headsets and desktop	Design review and collaboration; customers migrating to Workshop XR
Workshop XR	Autodesk	Current as of September 2026	Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S, Meta Quest Pro; web app	Multi-user review of Revit, Navisworks and IFC data from Autodesk Forma

Education and training

A 2018 review by Wang, Wu, Wang, Chi and Wang of 66 journal articles on VR in construction engineering education and training (1997 to September 2017) found that the technologies moved from desktop VR to immersive VR, game-based VR and BIM-enabled VR. BIM-based VR and desktop VR were the two largest categories, at 47% and 26% of the reviewed publications, and BIM-based VR and AR had drawn the most recent attention, with 27 and 7 publications respectively. The authors wrote that BIM-enabled VR "relies on the model, emphasizing on the data binding and connections", so that design elements can be checked before the building is built.

Research

Wang, Truijens, Hou, Wang and Zhou (2014) argued that real-time communication within BIM is limited by the lack of immersion in its virtual environments, and proposed methods for configuring BIM plus AR prototypes for onsite construction control in the liquefied natural gas industry; they wrote that extending BIM to the site through AR could address slow information retrieval, assembly errors and poor communication.

Chalhoub and Ayer (2018) ran a quasi-experiment with eighteen electrical construction workers who built similar conduit assemblies from paper drawings and from mixed reality. They reported that mixed reality gave a significantly higher productivity rate, less time to understand the design, fewer assembly errors and more accurately built conduits; nearly all participants found it easy to use, but most still said they would prefer paper plans. The authors noted that the small sample limits how far the results generalise.

The research agenda by Davila Delgado and colleagues proposed three areas for future work: engineering-grade devices robust enough for rough construction sites, workflow and data management for the data that AR and VR need, and new capabilities specific to construction. A 2022 systematic review by Safikhani, Keller, Schweiger and Pirker in the International Journal of Digital Earth identified communication and collaboration between design, construction, operation and maintenance as one of the barriers to BIM's use, and argued that immersive VR, made more accessible by consumer head-mounted displays, can give BIM capabilities that were previously unavailable or impractical.

See also

• Digital twin
• Computer-Aided Design
• Enterprise AR
• Enterprise VR
• Point cloud
• Photogrammetry
• Collaborative virtual environment