Col-Con: a collaborative and configurable VR platform for construction—a pipe installation case study

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) has become widely adopted for training, education, and collaboration applications. The construction industry, known for its complex work processes and numerous personnel involved, relies heavily on effective collaboration. Many existing VR research platforms are tailored to specific tasks and offer limited variability. They often demand specialized tools, programming languages, or expertise to enable configurability, thereby restricting accessibility and flexibility. Furthermore, researchers often require diverse settings for conducting user studies, and trainees generally benefit from varied scenarios to enhance training effectiveness. To address these challenges and needs, we introduce Col-Con, a VR platform designed to investigate collaborative behaviors in construction. Col-Con is a configurable, multi-user platform that enables researchers to set up simulations through intuitive and human-readable YAML configuration files. It provides immersive and realistic simulated construction environments, where real-time voice communication, synchronized transformations, animations, sounds, and interactions enhance collaborative experiences. To validate Col-Con’s capabilities and investigate user behaviors in a collaborative context, we implemented a realistic and configurable pipe installation task as a case study. A user study demonstrated that pipe installation on Col-Con is highly feasible, with participants reporting a strong sense of immersion and collaboration, making it well-suited for observing collaboration. Thanks to its modular architecture, Col-Con can be easily extended to support additional construction tasks. We envision that Col-Con will facilitate research on exploring virtual reality-based collaborative behaviors in construction and that Col-Con’s architecture and implementation can serve as a reference for designing future VR-based multiplayer research platforms. Col-Con is open-sourced at https://github.com/gmu-dcxr/VRC2-System .