Digital Twin (DT) has been widely adopted in construction and infrastructure projects
to focus on the management and control of physical systems and assets responsively
to meet the users’ requirements. When integrating immersion functions with the digital
and wireless transformation models, the DT applications can further allow users to
interact with and experience the model information in a more engaging and intuitive
way. To add new perspectives to DT applications, this research gave reality functions
to develop an immersive DT framework and presented a case study of VR- and AR-based
bridge health monitoring and twining systems to demonstrate the functionalities. The
case study was focused on the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) processes for a newly
constructed extradosed bridge, facilitated by the integration of Building Information
Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality, 3D game engines, and Internet
of Things (IoT) technologies. The bridge’s geometric and property information was
modeled in BIM parametric design software as a basis for VR model development and
was used to develop the BIM-based sensory model in the 3D game engine according to
the on-site conditions of the physically installed system. The integrated virtual
model was further deployed to the AR device via a VR-to-AR workflow and was presented
through the immersive DT dashboard. Project stakeholders can perform bridge damage
detection using the information available from the dashboard. In this dashboard the
IoT tools were used for the multi-source data integration process by storing, processing,
and transforming the monitoring data, lending opportunities for predictive simulations
of bridge condition states.
