DPR Construction, Inc. announced the completion of a virtual reality working exhibition at its Redwood City headquarters. The showroom, a partnership with WorldViz, brings advanced 3-D immersive visualization to building owners and the architecture, engineering and construction industry. WorldViz provides technologies that allow anyone to walk through a full-scale digital model to better understand layout and design features pre-construction. This holistic view of a project enables construction and architecture companies and their clients to make changes in the early stages of design, thus reducing time and resources spent on changes in the field or potential rework. The WorldViz Architecture Interactive showroom features a variety of 3-D immersive and semi-immersive display technologies using head-mounted display and motion tracking systems. The center piece is the WorldViz wide-area walking system. Once users put on the head-mounted display they can walk around and make adjustments to a construction project in real-time. For a less expansive walk-through, the virtual reality center also has a multi-projector setup option that includes a two-sided corner shaped CAVE environment. Instead of a full head-mount users wear light-weight 3-D glasses to interact with the display. DPR will begin using these technologies with projects that currently have virtual 3-D mockups.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that DPR Construction, Inc. has standardized on Bentley's ProjectWise for collaboration and work sharing in the delivery of all large construction projects. DPR's ProjectWise network currently consists of more than 2,000 active users working on more than 80 projects across 13 different regions of the United States. According to Andrew Fisher, BIM applications specialist at DPR Construction, ProjectWise helps the firm's project teams eliminate the time-consuming process of manual file and information management, increasing productivity across the board -- achieving as much as 10% on some projects. A proven leader in building information modeling (BIM) and integrated project delivery (IPD), DPR finds ProjectWise to be crucial on projects utilizing these design and construction delivery practices. With these innovative approaches, virtual building processes are used to produce coordinated documents prior to construction -- minimizing unanticipated costs and schedule disruptions during the actual building phase. However, these practices require a framework that can support an enormous exchange of information among multidisciplinary teams over a long period of time.

DPR Construction, Inc. has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to manage the construction of a regenerative medicine campus on behalf of Advanced BioHealing and Shire plc, with real estate partner BioMed Realty Trust, Inc. and designers Ferguson Pape Baldwin Architects. The new campus in Sorrento Mesa will expand the operational footprint of Shire's regenerative medicine business, Advanced BioHealing, Inc., and create the increased capacity it needs to meet future demand for its lead product, DERMAGRAFT, while offering additional space and infrastructure to manufacture new regenerative medicine products. Phase I of the site development will be in excess of 150,000 square feet and will house the company's manufacturing and associated support operations, commercial operations, corporate, and administrative functions. Preconstruction and design is underway with construction scheduled to begin in 2013. Initial occupancy is targeted for 2014.