Assessing Impacts of Immersive Virtual Reality-Based Design Reviews on Learners’ Self-Efficacy

An effective design review is critical to identifying changes and/or errors at the early stage of construction projects and reduce the project costs. Traditionally, design reviews are conducted by reviewing the project by reading multiple drawings. The inherent demands of reading project drawings are especially challenging for entry-level built environment learners who often need professional experience and may need more training and skills to fully understand technical representations. Previous research has focused on evaluating the impacts of interactive visualization technologies, such as virtual reality, on the learners’ design review thinking skills and showed how such technologies could support learners and industry professionals in performing design reviews. However, such research has yet to assess its impacts on their self-efficacy in engaging in design review thinking skills. Self-efficacy can be defined as one's perception of their ability to perform a task, such as problem-solving and evaluation. To understand how the VR technology can support learners in increasing their self-efficacy in performing design reviews, the researchers hosted a pilot study to evaluate immersive virtual reality design reviews' impacts. Based on the results of this pilot study, the implementation of immersive virtual reality has the potential to positively impact first year-built environment learners’ self-efficacy in performing design reviews.