A review on the open issue of color consistency in software for building information modeling systems and real-time visualization

This text discusses the issue of color consistency in BIM and Virtual Reality. In recent years, due to an increasingly stringent regulatory imposition in public procurement, especially concerning the estimated workloads, the BIM methodology has become increasingly popular among professionals in the architectural design field. In the 2000s, the visualization of projects was mainly done through photorealistic static renderings or animations obtained from sequences of static images. However, with the evolution of Raytrace Rendering engines and the escalating computing power of available hardware, Virtual Reality and augmented reality have gained significant popularity among designers for visualizing and facilitating project comprehension among clients and other professionals involved. Once the color of a finish has been acquired through correctly calibrated devices and standard procedures, the problem of its correct representation arises. The Methods section of this paper describes the preliminary procedures used to obtain a trustful Design Visualization, in the Result section we list some currently available solutions and their characteristics, thus analyzing how the applications address the issue nowadays, providing tools that allow designers to optimize color consistency between the real world and different visualizations and guarantee imaging correctness and quality. In conclusion, we summarise the different approaches to give an overall view of the tools available for the Designers.