Building your dream house or establishment requires heaping piles of cash and a whole lot of patience. It can take months, sometimes, years to get the job done. Not to mention the weeks and weeks of sourcing the documents, designs, and the teams you need. Regardless of whether the end-product is a house or a restaurant or a warehouse with pharma-friendly floors, in a virtual world, time is immaterial and everything can be granted.
A virtual world of anything
The digital space made available by life and building simulators like the multimillion juggernaut of a game The Sims tickles the imagination of kids and adults alike. They can somehow be educational, teaching players the basics of home construction. Anyone can build their dream home, even recreate famous homes, such as Frank Lloyd Wright originals, or TV/movie structures like The Simpsons’ house or Bob’s restaurant in Bob’s Burgers.
Such simulation can also create achievable aesthetics. Whether you’re going for a gothic manse or a sustainable tiny house, you’re given the power to achieve such. You can build a modern-day Greek labyrinth or paint the walls velvet purple as a homage to Prince. There’s instant gratification when recreating the home you want using such simulation games. Even sustainable housing can be visualized in that virtual world with the right expansions or modifications.
However, limitations still persist despite the “endless” possibilities. Practical material choices, for one, become only an aesthetic choice. There’s no effect to your virtual avatar whether your floors are carpeted with fur or a synthetic one. Since everything’s instant, there’s a lack of paperwork and realistic construction.
Blurring the lines between reality and the virtual world
The Sims, however, can represent the future of the construction industry. When seen on a macro scale, such as when you play its sibling game SimCity, you can see how successful urban planning and development can be beneficial to a society.
Unlike this soon-to-be real-life Sims nightmare of a rooftop infinity pool that thankfully remains a concept for now.
With modern construction practices in mind, such virtual worlds offer a chance for thinking in 3D, seeing the interactions of simulated avatars towards every possible design choice. The Sims, after all, started as an architecture simulator. Offsite construction can be the nearest possibility towards the instant Sims-like construction, as each part is constructed in a factory and everything is just assembled onsite.
Long-term decisions play an important role when it comes to building construction. From the effectiveness of the materials used to the sturdiness of the construction, a structure can only be as strong as how it was built. It’s why the advances in construction simulation have paved the way for virtual “verification builds” instead of physical prototypes.
The aforementioned sandbox games can reveal some design impracticalities in dream homes in the form of utility bills, or walking time and distance between points A to B. Of course, asking an architect or interior designer would be the better choice, but it doesn’t hurt to visualize what could be. In other words, leave the final design to the professionals, but let them know what you want it to look like.
The future of the construction industry might be more streamlined. Instead of the typical construction timeline, modern houses might soon be built instantaneously. However, before moving on to that Googie-like future, there’s still the skill shortage and sustainability issues plaguing the industry. It needs all the help it can get in shaping the minds of future architects and interior designers.