Medical ICU Mockup with AR

• 64 negative-pressure ICU rooms
• Wider corridors for emergency gear
• Real-time staff feedback via AR

AR technology also allows for manipulation in real time. For instance, to help the client decide between different design options, you can set up the AR model so that certain features can be turned on and off or so options can be seen side by side.

At UK HealthCare, we were able to explore different configurations for patient room entries by changing the spacing of the window and door, and the direction of the door’s swing within adjacent rooms. This enabled medical staff to ‘sit’ at the nurse station and test which window placement provided the ideal view to support their workflow and patient care. We did the same with different headwall configurations.

Before bringing AR into the review process, GBBN's team found that stakeholders often could not fully picture what a dimensioned drawing meant in real terms, whether a window sat high enough off the floor to see out of from a hospital bed, or whether a nursing station's sightlines actually covered the hallway it was meant to watch. Misunderstandings like these tend to surface only after construction, when changes are far more costly.

The stakes were higher than usual on this project, since UK HealthCare needed its new 12th floor ICU to consolidate patients previously spread across multiple floors and to function as a pandemic surge unit. Getting corridor widths, negative-pressure room layouts, and staff work areas right the first time mattered more than it would on a typical renovation, leaving little room for the kind of guesswork that 2D drawings alone can invite.

Hospitals, for instance, will rent warehouse space to create full-scale, foam mockups of a new department. Like AR, this allows healthcare teams to run simulations and evaluate the space, but it is much more time-consuming to produce and expensive to store. AR models, on the other hand, are produced quickly and don’t require you to sign a lease in order to store them.

GBBN's AR-assisted design process supported a 61,000-square-foot overhaul of UK HealthCare's Chandler Hospital 12th floor, consolidating medical and cardiovascular ICU patients previously spread across multiple floors into a single 64-room unit. Every room was designed with negative-pressure capability so it can be converted for communicable-disease isolation during a surge, a direct response to lessons learned treating COVID-19 patients starting in 2020. Corridors were widened beyond the standard 8 feet by reclaiming space from patient rooms, creating flexible zones for emergency equipment storage during crises.

Standing inside the AR-projected space let clinical staff catch workflow and sightline issues, such as nurse station placement and window height, while changes were still nearly free to make, rather than after construction began. The finished floor also added pass-through medication ports for isolation rooms, decentralized nursing stations with interior transparency, dedicated staff respite areas, an on-site pharmacy, and a Serious Communicable Disease Lab, reflecting a design brief that weighed staff wellbeing alongside patient care.

Tapping into that intuitive understanding of space is especially valuable for healthcare clients, because their frequently repeated procedures (e.g., checking vitals and charting patient records) enable them to feel when the space is working or not.

But this value is not limited to healthcare clients. We also recently used an AR model to enable a theater company to see how different lobby and concessions configurations would help them manage the pre-show and intermission crush of activity they experience.