Bucknell University’s new academic wing

• Over $500,000 saved on one fix
• VR design review before construction
• Owner-reported 10x return

Why a Real-Time 3D Engine for Design Review

Mortenson is a United States top-20 builder, developer and provider of energy and engineering services, with offices across the country. Several years before this project the firm created a dedicated Virtual Insights team, a small group of four based in Seattle and Minneapolis, to bring interactive visualization into its design and customer experience offering. The team now delivers around twenty real-time 3D projects a year.

One model, every headset

The decisive practical advantage of building review experiences on a real-time 3D engine is output flexibility. Mortenson's work is delivered to HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go and HoloLens as well as to 360 video, covering more than twenty-five devices and platforms in total. A university client with no VR hardware can be sent a 360 video; a project team in the room can put on a headset. The same source model serves both, and the team does not have to learn a new pipeline for each target.

Multi-user review at full scale

The experiences are networked, so several stakeholders occupy the virtual building simultaneously rather than taking turns. Mortenson's Will Adams has described the effect directly: having everyone in VR at the same time speeds up decision-making and removes ambiguity about what a space will look and feel like. On a university project, where the decision-makers include facilities staff, faculty, senior administration and sometimes donors, that shared presence is worth more than image quality.

A note on the tool listing

aec+tech lists Unity Reflect against this case study. Unity's published account of the Bucknell work describes experiences built by the Virtual Insights team on the Unity engine; Unity Reflect is Unity's dedicated BIM-to-real-time product for AEC. Readers researching a specific Reflect deployment should treat the tool tag as an association with the Unity real-time platform rather than as a documented Reflect workflow.

Dimensional correctness is not the same as spatial quality

The academic wing was designed and modelled correctly, yet a corridor still read as too tight once a column was in place. This is the central challenge that traditional documentation cannot address: plans and sections confirm that a space meets its dimensional criteria but say almost nothing about how it will be experienced by someone walking through it.

Late discovery is expensive

On a construction project the cost of a change rises steeply with time. A column position that could be adjusted cheaply in design becomes a structural problem once foundations and framing are in. Any method that moves discovery earlier is worth real money, and the earlier it moves, the more it is worth.

Non-technical decision-makers

University projects are approved by administrators, faculty committees and trustees rather than by designers. Asking that group to sign off a building from a drawing set puts the risk of misunderstanding entirely on the client, and it is usually the client who pays for the resulting change.

Fundraising and recruitment need the building to exist early

Donors and prospective students respond to buildings, not to documents. The university needed a way to show a compelling version of the wing years before it opened.

The established way to test a space before building it is the physical mockup: a full-size partial construction of a corridor, room or facade assembly, put up so that the client can stand in it. Mockups work, and for some assemblies they are still irreplaceable, but they are expensive, they take weeks to build, they usually appear too late in the programme to allow a fundamental change, and typically only one or two versions ever get built.

Everything else was decided from drawings and static renderings. Both represent dimensions accurately and both are poor at conveying how a dimension feels. The Bucknell corridor is a precise example: no drawing was wrong, and the problem was still real.

Mortenson's Virtual Insights team was created specifically to close that gap, delivering the experiential test that a mockup provides without the cost, the lead time or the one-shot limitation.

More than 500,000 dollars avoided on a single issue

The headline outcome on this project is specific and published: identifying the column and corridor problem inside the virtual model, before construction, saved Bucknell University more than 500,000 US dollars compared with resolving it on site. That figure comes from Unity's case study on Mortenson rather than from an estimate.

A stated return of at least ten to one

Ken Ogawa, Bucknell's Associate Vice President for Facilities and Sustainability, assessed the programme in terms of return rather than of a single fix, stating that finding and avoiding issues had already "paid for this effort at least 10x". For a client evaluating whether immersive review earns its keep, an owner-side multiple like that is more useful than a software feature list.

Faster decisions, fewer review cycles

Because the experiences are networked and at scale, stakeholders reach agreement inside one session instead of across successive rounds of drawing markups. Mortenson reports that this both speeds iteration and removes ambiguity about what a space will feel like, which shortens the design review programme itself.

Value beyond the construction budget

The same asset was used to present the wing to donors and prospective students. In higher education, visualization that supports a fundraising campaign or a recruitment cycle produces a return on a completely different ledger from the construction contingency, and it costs nothing extra to produce once the model exists.

Wider pattern across Mortenson's portfolio

Comparable published outcomes from the same team include an estimated 45,000 dollars saved on a physical mockup on the Stonebridge Marriott project and 375,000 dollars saved on locker assemblies at Kansas State University, which suggests the Bucknell result is characteristic rather than exceptional.

About Mortenson's Virtual Insights team

Mortenson is a privately held, United States based top-20 builder, developer and provider of energy and engineering services, with expertise spanning commercial building, sports facilities, healthcare, renewable energy, virtual design and construction, and construction safety. Its Virtual Insights team, four people working from Seattle and Minneapolis, was founded by emerging technologies developers including Will Adams and Marc Kinsman and produces roughly twenty real-time 3D projects a year for clients including Stonebridge Marriott Hotels, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania State University, Kaiser Permanente and the University of Washington Medical Center.

Delivery platforms

HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HoloLens and 360 video, with output supported to more than twenty-five devices and platforms.