The digital transformation of the AECO sector shows no signs of slowing down. Reality capture devices, artificial intelligence, immersive environments and digital twin platforms continue to emerge every month, promising to transform the way we design, build, manage and operate assets. To compare this promise with real-world practice, Coloma+Armengol attended the XR & Metaverse Fair Tokyo, one of the leading trade fairs dedicated to immersive technologies.
The visit took place within the framework of the Industrial Doctorate jointly developed by Coloma+Armengol and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), an initiative focused on researching the convergence of BIM and the Metaverse applied to the AECO sector.
What did we see at the XR & Metaverse Fair?
Our first conclusion was that immersive technologies have reached a significantly higher level of maturity compared to previous editions of the fair. During our visit, we identified five main categories of solutions: augmented and mixed reality headsets, reality capture systems based on Gaussian Splatting, mobile capture devices (tablets and smartphones), immersive training platforms, and digital assistants powered by generative AI.
Augmented and mixed reality headsets are clearly gaining ground over pure virtual reality devices, particularly in environments where maintaining a connection with the real physical space is essential, such as construction sites or industrial facilities. One practical issue that remains unresolved is accessibility for users who wear prescription glasses—a barrier to adoption that is often overlooked in commercial demonstrations.
Haptic devices, on the other hand, are still at an early stage of development. We did not find any innovations suggesting widespread adoption in the short term beyond the solutions already available.
Overall, hardware is no longer the key differentiator. The relevant question is no longer which headset we wear or the resolution of the displays, but rather what we do with the information these technologies allow us to visualize and manage.
Reality Capture Is Becoming Democratized
The most evident trend at the exhibition is the rapid proliferation of technologies capable of generating digital representations of the physical world faster and at increasingly lower cost: photogrammetry, LiDAR scanning integrated into tablets and smartphones and, above all, Gaussian Splatting—a technique capable of generating highly photorealistic representations of physical spaces with a computational cost far lower than that of traditional point clouds.
The most significant leap forward comes from reality capture using consumer devices. Tablets and smartphones now provide levels of accuracy that, only a few years ago, required expensive specialized equipment, lowering the barrier to entry for construction teams that previously had no access to these tools.
Reality capture is therefore becoming increasingly accessible. However, this ease of capture leads to an important reflection.
Capturing Is Not Understanding
This is probably the main conclusion of our visit. Today’s technologies capture the physical world with increasing ease, but representing reality is not the same as understanding it.
A photorealistic model can accurately display a technical installation, a pipeline or a façade. What it cannot explain is what material it is made of, who supplied it, what maintenance it requires, which regulations apply to it or how it relates to other elements within the construction system. This is the difference between representing information and structuring knowledge, and it is precisely here that BIM continues to provide value that Gaussian Splatting alone cannot offer.
The easier it becomes to generate geometry, the more important it is to have information models capable of providing semantics, context and relationships between data. Gaussian Splatting helps us see the world; BIM helps us understand it.
Extended Reality as the Interface for Future Digital Twins
Augmented reality and virtual reality are no longer evolving as independent technologies. They are increasingly connected to information management processes and digital twins: on-site visualization of BIM models superimposed onto the built environment, construction progress monitoring by comparing the planned model with the actual site conditions, and direct updating of the as-built model from the worker’s helmet.
One particularly noteworthy solution combined BIM, building services, augmented reality and as-built model updating within a single workflow. This type of solution points to a key idea: construction sites are no longer merely consumers of information—they are also becoming producers of information. In this context, augmented reality could become one of the main interfaces for updating future digital twins.
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Assistants
Artificial intelligence was present throughout the exhibition, rather than as a standalone category. Several solutions combined virtual avatars, digital assistants and generative AI to facilitate interaction with information, often integrated into Digital Twin platforms.
The possibility of accessing information through natural language, receiving contextual assistance or interacting with specialized agents opens up new ways to simplify access to complex data. Rather than replacing information models, these systems function as an additional layer of interaction with the knowledge already contained within the model.
Training Emerges as One of the Most Mature Applications
Among all the applications presented, professional training was one of the most mature. Companies such as XR Nursing demonstrate how virtual reality enables professionals to train in safe, repeatable and controlled environments. The same principle is applied to industrial and manufacturing process simulations, as well as emergency response training for events such as earthquakes.
Gaussian Splatting’s ability to reproduce real environments with high fidelity helps users recognize their surroundings and react more naturally in critical situations, reinforcing the value of these simulations over purely synthetic environments.
We also observed applications involving the digitization of people, avatars and motion capture, aimed at remote collaboration and knowledge transfer between teams.
Perhaps the most interesting conclusion of this section is that the first large-scale application of extended reality will not necessarily be visualization, but rather the training and upskilling of people.
From the Digital Twin to the Industrial Metaverse
None of the solutions presented at the exhibition claimed to be “the Metaverse” in the strict sense of the term, and rightly so. Over recent years, the term has been used so broadly to describe almost any 3D environment that it has lost much of its precision. What we did observe, however, were several interconnected building blocks pointing in that direction: persistent environments that remain updated between sessions, digital user identities that move seamlessly from one platform to another, and digital replicas of physical assets.
For the AECO sector, the Metaverse is not meaningful as a social or entertainment space. Its true value lies in interoperability: an environment where BIM models, real-time IoT data from assets and the digital identities of all stakeholders coexist within the same space, without depending on a single proprietary platform. Here, the issue identified earlier becomes evident once again: as long as data formats remain closed, this vision will remain little more than a promise.
What Does All This Mean for the AECO Sector?
Our visit confirms that Digital Twins should not be understood as a single technology, but rather as the convergence of reality capture, BIM, artificial intelligence and extended reality. It also highlights an important warning that should not be overlooked: many of the solutions presented still rely on proprietary formats, making interoperability between platforms more difficult and limiting the development of open ecosystems—an especially critical issue for an industry committed to openBIM.
Behind all these innovations lies a challenge that has remained unchanged: information management. Regardless of the technologies that emerge in the coming years, the ability to generate value will continue to depend on having reliable, structured and meaningful data to support decision-making. For this reason, the Metaverse should be understood as a persistent ecosystem that serves as the common thread connecting all these technologies.
After several days exploring the exhibition, the overall impression is clear: there are fewer conceptual demonstrations and more solutions focused on solving real-world problems. BIM, extended reality, artificial intelligence and digital twins are not competing technologies—they complement one another. The challenge for the coming years will be integrating them while never losing sight of one essential fact: no matter how photorealistic geometry becomes, it will never replace structured information.
Supported by the Industrial Doctorates Programme of the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya).