BIM in the Metaverse of Madness

Paul Doherty, IFMA Fellow, DFC Senior Fellow

world is that design professionals are more valued than ever as they produce the Digital DNA of the Built Environment.

The journey from Digital Twins to Virtual Worlds to our current state of the Metaverse Industries like aerospace and pharmaceutical manufacturing have been using Digital Twin protocols and processes for decades. I personally find it amusing that many in our construction industry that suddenly realize that the construction documents that are necessary for the contractual obligations of delivering a building for an owner are actual Digital Twins. Welcome to the party that has been operating since the mid1990s in the construction industry. The difference today is that there is an application programming interface (API), which is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. This allows industry associations, AEC companies, AEC individuals, and the open market to interface together in a digital environment that can incorporate AEC traditional processes of what, why, and how to build the built environment while also capturing and developing the foundation of the digital built environment in the form of what Mark Zuckerberg calls the Metaverse. At my company TDG, as real estate developers, we have been capturing our contracted digital assets up until our contracts with our consultants are ended. The interesting timing of what to do with these digital assets is the growth and adoption of putting these digital assets into a gaming environment. This allows a richer experience to interface with the digital assets either as VR/Immersive,

AR/Augmented, or XR/Mixed Reality. By allowing different ‘Virtual Worlds’ to connect together through the gaming environment, we can create a Federated Metaverse, creating digital real estate. This decentralized virtual environment is fertile ground for leveraging existing construction documents into the Metaverse, providing new revenue streams through new experiences.

DLT, Smart Contracts, and Blockchain

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is the formal term used to create the large bucket of descriptions that the media calls Blockchain. In its essence, it is a decentralized approach to managing data in a trusted digital environment. The design of DLT/Blockchain is very attractive to the Construction Industry for the following reasons:

• Our industry already works in a decentralized framework, where we use contracts to describe the who, what, why, and how (and how much) to build a building on a specific project.

• Blockchain places data into a data block that becomes trusted over time through the chain of immutable data. Our traditional contracts of Owner/Architect, Owner/ General Contractor. General Contractor/ Sub-Contractor that are based on a Parent/ Child framework is a seamless fit for a function of DLT/Blockchain technology called Smart Contracts.

Smart Contracts are one of the major technology breakthroughs for our industry as it provides a trusted system that is familiar yet provides a streamlining and improvement of many project functions such as; QA/QC, Work In Place, Project Payments, etc.

Woven Collisions: NFTs, Metaverse and the future of the Construction Industry

Another use of DLT/Blockchain technology is the process of creating and exchanging Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). According to Wikipedia, NFTs are the unique and non-interchangeable units of data stored on a digital ledger (Blockchain). NFTs can be associated with easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files as unique items (analogous to a certificate of authenticity) and use blockchain technology to give the NFT a public proof of ownership. At my company, TDG, we are leveraging NFTs for the built environment in the form of:

• The design aesthetic of a building

• The elements that make up the building (NFTs for materials, systems, equipment, appliances) that be measured for both work in place and lifecycle performance

• Creating both UN Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) and Environment/Social/Governance (ESG) measures for active NFTs

• NFTs as an element for all Smart Contracts in the Construction Industry

The immediate use of NFTs that we have implemented is to develop virtual galleries for the display and transactions of NFTs by celebrities, iconic collectibles, and luxury merchandise. This woven collision of NFT’s being experienced in the Metaverse is just the beginning of what we see as a decentralized Metaverse that has infinite experiences all experiencing a world of digital real estate.

Another area of interest regarding the use of the Metaverse in the design and construction process is the use of 24x7 Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven avatars as an extension of decision making elements for successful project delivery. In the modern gaming world, the game never ends and is always on. With Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite as examples, players can use their avatars for playing their games in real time and once they leave the game, the game is still being played/experienced by others. The opportunity for construction projects in adopting avatars as ‘players’, is that, like a game, the construction project never stops. There maybe fewer workers at certain times of the day, but the project is ongoing. By adopting a Metaverse environment as a component of project controls, avatars of each stakeholder can continue to work in some capacity like analysis, reporting, decision making, etc. even when the physical stakeholder is no longer on site. This AI issues. Who owns the rights to the Digital Twin (the designer, the building owner, etc.) is a lawsuit waiting to happen. So do not fall for the Silicon Snake Oil salesman who promises to unlock your design firm’s untapped value of taking your BIM to the Metaverse. Best practice dictates that taking proper steps with ownership rights management, defining the LOE to be used in each instance and learning overtime how the digital asset should be designed with rich experiences that cannot be designed in the physical world (like the ability to turn on and off physics). Physical architecture may have a lot to learn from its digital twin and subsequent LOE in the Metaverse.

As we all explore BIM in the Metaverse, it would be helpful to define and describe each state that the digital real estate asset has:

• BUILDING INFORMATION MODEL (BIM): A construction document Information model with 3D geometric modeling characteristics

• DIGITAL TWIN: A mirror image digital asset model that describes a physical asset in 3D geometry and in some cases, it also describes the data model and workflows of the physical asset

• VIRTUAL WORLDS: Analogous to planets, solar systems and galaxies, virtual worlds are digital real estate assets that provide experiences in the Metaverse. Virtual worlds are places in the Metaverse.

• METAVERSE: The Metaverse is the next evolution of the Internet. Analogous to Outer Space, the Metaverse is a communication/commerce environment that provides the concepts of virtual worlds and digital real estate to exist. Tony Parisi best describes the Metaverse in his 7 rules:

Rule #1: There is only one Metaverse Rule #2: The Metaverse is for Everyone

Rule #3: Nobody Controls the Metaverse

Rule #4: The Metaverse is Open

Rule #5: The Metaverse is HardwareIndependent Rule #6: The Metaverse is a Network

Rule #7: The Metaverse is the Internet

• OMNIVERSE: Due to human’s being human’s, not everyone is following the 7 rules of the Metaverse and in order to regulate its expansiveness, there are efforts to federate the multitudes of virtual worlds and bad actor Metaverse’s. One such large effort is being made by NVIDIA with its Omniverse initiative, meant to be an alternative to the pure play commercialization Metaverse such as the old Facebook, now known as Meta.

What an amazing time we are living in today. We are all pioneers in a new age that creates a tremendous value of the use of the digital DNA of our built environment.