ASHRAE Journal - May 2021 - 26

INDUSTRY 4.0

site, " he said, helping the team avoid costly rework and
delays.

Operations and Maintenance
Once a building is constructed and occupied, AR can
still be a valuable tool. This technology can aid facilities
managers in training their staff. This technology can
also help building owners with QA/QC processes.
Maintenance workers, for instance, are able retrieve
and see actual assets' information by scanning assigned
QR codes, such as the HVAC&R equipment. If there is a
true Digital Twin that is connected to real-time information from another source, such as a building automation system or sensors, this information can also be
retrieved in real-time by using the barcode. This allows
the user to see all this real-time information overlaid
on the asset and that helps them with the decisionmaking process.
" In the future the workers will be able to easily see
operational data in context, " said Messner. AR can support people by providing information they need, he said.
Messner said Penn State already tags equipment with
barcodes so operations and maintenance staff can walk
up to the system and pull up the updated information
on the equipment with their phone.
" That's not such a new technology, " he said. " But [with
AR] it could start to show me real-time data in place,
so I could see the temperatures of water in a particular
pipe... I could see which valves are open in a system
around the entire building. I could start to see other
information, such as flow rates, humidity or even locations where fire dampers have been closed in an emergency scenario. "

Training
AR can also encourage collaboration and real-time
problem-solving. Some technologies have remote assistant tools that allow people to video call someone to help
them work through a problem, said Lawver.
This feature helps AR become a training tool, he said,
especially with experts getting to retirement age. Instead
of having one person on-site who knows everything
there is to know about boiler rooms, that person can
work remotely, said Lawver. The technology, when headmounted, is hands-free, which helps people actually do
the work at the same time they give guidance-compared
to a traditional video call.
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" He can just sit on his couch and phone in to every
project in the state. Rather than getting in his F-150
and driving around the state all day and maybe only
solving one issue a day, now he's solving 10 issues a
day just by being able to do it remotely, " he said. " All
the while, the people who are on the other side still
have to use their hands to fix the issue... so not only
are they getting help, but they're also learning as they
go. "
Lawver said the technology can also be used as a
recruiting tool. " If you bring cool technology into construction, people are going to come and want to work
in the industry, especially the Millennials and Gen Z
generations that are more attracted to wherever they can
use tech, " he said.
He said the more the construction industry adopts
innovative technologies, the more young people will
want to work in the industry. " You're better driving
young folks into the industry by having cool technology,
and you're providing a mechanism for one to learn from
the other, " he said.
At Penn State, Messner is teaching AR in the classroom.
The university has used AR to create a sustainability
education game for students on a tablet PC. " We allow
students to go into an actual building space and experiment with replacing the building materials and systems,
and then they can see and get performance information
in the real-world context, " he said.
" I'm super excited about AR for education and training because we can walk people through a series of
steps. We can augment information on top of real-world
content instead of using mock-ups or other training scenarios, " he said. " That's one of the areas that we're doing
research in AR-what's the value of the augmented information within a training scenario. "

Tips and Best Practices
When getting started with AR, Messner recommends
new users become familiar with the technology by giving
it a few test runs, using free phone applications such as
Augment (see sidebar). He said he usually does this with
his students before diving deeper.
Ghorbani recommends studying " examples from other
fields such as the manufacturing industry with a longer
history of AR implementation. "
" It can also be very valuable to leverage existing platforms by major vendors... Then, for advanced users,

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