What is Visual Interface Planning (VIP)?

Visual Interface Planning (VIP) is an innovative approach that leverages advanced Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) and interactive simulations to revolutionize the planning and integration of complex infrastructure projects. VIP is designed to go beyond traditional static drawings and models, providing a dynamic, human-scale environment where all stakeholders can collaboratively visualize, test, and refine designs in real-time.

The focus of VIP is on creating an intelligent and interactive interface planning process, ensuring seamless infrastructure development. This integrated methodology leads to improved decision-making, reduced costs, and accelerated project timelines, ultimately delivering superior outcomes for communities and stakeholders.

Navigating Compounding Complexity: The VIP Advantage

As Dr. Ben Guy highlights, poor planning at all levels of design and construction can take years with high costs, low levels of confidence, low collaboration and buy-in, high administration and management effort, and difficult relationship management for clients. Impacts to reputation and brand can be high, as well as being a stressful process.

For a project leader, each new stakeholder and each new interface compounds planning complexity. Planning is both a social and physical science – combining engagement, negotiation, context, culture, environment, time, space, interfaces, and design across often siloed specializations into an integrated shared plan that everyone must fully understand. In complex projects, project leaders need to manage hundreds of constraints, interfaces, and stakeholders to create an elegant, appropriate, and affordable solution.

• Interfaces include constraints, adjacent operations, neighbors, safety, access, solar and sightlines, wayfinding, signaling, user and operator experience, flooding, hydrology and utilities, functional outcomes, engineering compliance, and more.
• Stakeholders include businesses, operators, staff, neighbors, agencies, lobby groups, politicians, technical advisors, contractors, subject matter experts, communities, regulators, clients, managers, executives, and adjacent projects.

Project Complexity vs. Interfaces/Stakeholders

This conceptual graph illustrates how VIP helps mitigate the compounding complexity and associated costs as the number of interfaces and stakeholders increases in a project.

Without the right planning process, tools, and approach, planning can be painful and difficult for managers. Speak to interactive interface planning experts today to see how we can save programme and help you make millions in savings.

VIP Applied: Addressing 22 Project Challenges

Planning Collaboration

Challenge: Traditional engineering often works in silos, leading to fragmented collaboration and misaligned outcomes.

Solution: VIP facilitates real-time, interactive workshops with human-scale CGI models, ensuring alignment and shared understanding from day one, cutting project timelines by months and years and leading to significant cost efficiencies.

Technical Debt

Challenge: Siloed design leads to costly reworks and increased technical debt (studies show technical debt can increase project costs by 15-20%).

Solution: VIP ensures contextual cross-disciplinary integration from the pre-design phase, identifying and resolving issues in real-time with high-fidelity human-scale tools, significantly lowering overall project costs and shortening delivery times.

Operational Testing

Challenge: Traditional static plans are ineffective for experiential operational testing, resulting in operational inefficiencies and compliance risks that can delay project delivery and cause significant cost issues.

Solution: VIP utilizes immersive, accurate 3D simulations for real-time operational testing of design options iteratively, ensuring functionality and reducing operational risks and cutting delays in operational readiness.

Customer Experience Testing

Challenge: Traditional methods lack the ability to simulate customer experiences, risking suboptimal outcomes and reduced satisfaction (industry reports indicate a 20-40% reduction in end-user satisfaction).

Solution: VIP enables live, interactive, human-scale experiential analysis, allowing stakeholders to virtually interact with the design, assuring it meets end-user needs, leading to better outcomes and reduced rebuilds.

Flexibility and Agility

Challenge: Rigid engineering approaches hinder quick adaptations and iterations in the concept stage, leading to longer project timelines and increased costs as the ability to impact cost decreases across project lifecycle stages.

Solution: VIP provides a flexible, human-scale integrated online CGI sandbox, enabling rapid adjustments and scenario testing, accelerating project progression and responsiveness, reducing overall project timelines by months and years.

Shared Understanding

Challenge: Complex drawings and data are difficult to interpret, leading to low shared understanding and increased risk of errors across stakeholders, resulting in increased reworks and project costs.

Solution: VIP leverages real-time 3D simulation tools that are easily understood by all stakeholders, fostering a high level of shared understanding and minimizing errors, thus reducing redesigns, delays, and costs.

Responsiveness

Challenge: Traditional design and engineering processes suffer from long response times (average time to incorporate feedback can be days and weeks), leading to delays and increased costs.

Solution: VIP enables real-time collaboration and instantaneous feedback at constraint and concept stage, drastically reducing response times and ensuring rapid updates and adjustments throughout the concept development process, improving response times and progressions.

Option Comparison

Challenge: Traditional planning relies heavily on ‘mental acrobatics’, making it challenging to compare nuanced changes and leading to decision-making paralysis and delays.

Solution: VIP allows for integrated, immersive 3D comparisons of operationalized design options, providing 100% clear visualizations that radically reduce decision-making times per option.

Internal Stakeholder Engagement

Challenge: Engaging internal stakeholders with 2D drawings and static models is difficult, leading to delays, stalls, unfunded projects, and a cycle of rework.

Solution: VIP simplifies internal stakeholder engagement by using real-time CGI simulation for interactive visibility, generating instant shared understanding, resulting in fast decision-making and radically decreased timelines for busy managers.

Site Integration

Challenge: Traditional 2D processes and static 3D struggle with site integration, leading to lack of cohesion and slow development, resulting in 15-20% higher project costs due to reworks.

Solution: VIP creates full integration of critical site and operational elements in context using a living accurate human-scale 3D CGI model, allowing for seamless testing and ensuring cohesive design outcomes and rational, context-level thinking.

Validation and Interface Assurance

Challenge: Validating design integration is difficult with traditional methods, leading to low confidence and delays (studies show a 15-25% increase in project timelines due to poor validation).

Solution: VIP provides a robust platform for validation and assurance through accurate CGI simulations and stress testing in an immersive ‘extended reality’ (XR) environment, reducing assurance and validation times by months at constraint, concept, and IFC stages.

Site Constraint Audits

Challenge: Without human-scale 3D simulation, more site visits become necessary, slowing progress, increasing risks, and timelines. Physical audits are limited.

Solution: VIP allows for HD virtual site audits at a human scale within the 3D LiDAR and survey model, reducing the need for physical site visits, mitigating safety risks, and accelerating project timelines.

Infrastructure Planning Costs and Time

Challenge: Traditional approaches incur high direct and indirect costs, including engagement fees, variations, and overheads. The longer design takes, the more costs increase across admin, management, and design fees.

Solution: VIP reduces costs by visually integrating development and review in intuitive, interactive CGI, minimizing redesigns, meetings, and presentations. It is common for years of time to be saved in projects with VIP, leading to significant financial returns.

Interface Planning

Challenge: Technical experts often use a ‘presumptive’ template approach with low contextual consideration, resulting in client dissatisfaction and high project development times and costs due to changes and redesigns.

Solution: VIP fosters an open, collaborative environment where all perspectives are obvious and considered from day one, mitigating the risks of presumptive design by warranting that design reviews and decisions are contextualized and responsive to client needs, reducing variations and timelines considerably.

Regulatory Interface Planning

Challenge: Conventional design can be a series of stacked regulations, often resulting in a mediocre, compromised solution with low innovation and contextualization, leading to reputation impacts and increases in reworks.

Solution: Advanced VIP integrates regulatory requirements with contextualized design to find solutions quicker, ensuring compliance without compromising on quality or design relevance, improving responsiveness, integration, cohesion, reputation, and delivering faster close-outs.

Infrastructure Planning to Prevent ‘Rabbit Warrening’

Challenge: Conventional engineering design often ‘overcooks the details’ before assurance of the integrated design solution, leading to unnecessary costs and delays.

Solution: VIP innately creates contextual constraint understanding from the outset, preventing this “rabbit warren” effect by forcing integration and controlling SME input to critical points, which reduces costs and timelines by months and years.

Stress Testing

Challenge: Stress-testing solutions under high loads or environmental shocks is difficult and expensive with traditional methods, often leading to over-design or under-preparation, increasing project costs and risks.

Solution: VIP includes robust stress-testing capabilities within 3D simulations, allowing for variable testing of loads in rapid timeframes using integrated physics-based simulations. An hour of VIP stress-testing scenarios early saves months and millions later, delivering improved resilience.

Multi-Use and Multi-User Interface Testing

Challenge: Testing designs across phases, users, and operational modalities is difficult with 2D or static 3D scenarios, increasing the risk of design failure by 15-20%.

Solution: VIP inherently includes multi-use and multi-user testing within integrated 3D optionated simulations, ensuring designs are optimized for all phases and user groups, reducing the risk of design failure and optimizing user satisfaction, improving project success, reputations, and shortening delivery timelines.

Interface Planning: Avoiding Over-Design and Under-Integration

Challenge: Modern projects typically suffer from over-design and under-integration, leading to functional but underperforming solutions and an unnecessary decrease in project efficiency and productivity.

Solution: VIP achieves balanced design and integration so all visible elements interface seamlessly through obviating the outcome. Reducing complexity and bringing integrated interface issues to light iteratively and collaboratively leads to efficient, effective, well-integrated solutions, reducing project costs and oversights.

Community Interface Engagement

Challenge: Managing communities can be difficult, especially where there is distrust and fear of change, impeding progress and delaying projects for months and years, significantly increasing costs.

Solution: VIP allows for easy community and stakeholder engagement with AAA visual quality to intuitively review project options, integrations, and interfaces, ameliorating concerns. This radically reduces ‘noise’, meetings, and negative sentiment on projects which drive up costs and delays.

External Stakeholder Engagement

Challenge: Managing external stakeholders is slow and challenging when using technical drawings, leading to high effort for managers and long delays in social licenses and regulatory approvals.

Solution: VIP streamlines external stakeholder management by providing intuitive visual simulations with outputs to AAA quality CGI imagery and video. This fosters better communication, higher trust, and more efficient approval processes, proven to reduce approval timelines by months and years, reducing stakeholder meetings from 5 to 1 per group and issue.

Planning Inputs for Interfaces

Challenge: Managing stakeholders and input requirements with non-specific, high-level language can be frustrating, decreasing efficiency and increasing misinterpretations and delays.

Solution: VIP effectively ensures that stakeholder inputs become SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely). With simulated digital CGI models, the least design-literate person can give detailed, actionable, measurable inputs, increasing stakeholder confidence and reducing effort and timelines to receive and resolve inputs.