Copenhagen airport's new pier e

Over the next 20-25 years, the number of passengers at Copenhagen Airport is expected to increase from 29 million to 40 million.

To handle the increasing traffic and keep passenger satisfaction high, Copenhagen Airports A/S will be investing DKK 20 billion during the next 10-20 years in major expansion plans.

As part of the expansion plans, the new pier E will provide critical capacity to the airport as it adds an additional 22,000 square metres in a three-storey building with gate lounge areas, bus lounges and mezzanine levels.

In the design phase, the use of virtual reality was applied through a simple process: 

• The project manager located strategic points of interest for exploration in VR.
• The BIM Manager prepared the file and uploaded it to Autodesk’s cloud services.
• The VR models returned to COWI in less than one hour.
• The VR community ‘beautified’ the models before publishing.

Through this process, more than 25 small VR models were developed, and about 100 Homidi glasses where handed out to the partners. The easy-to-use VR models enlightened the discussions with technical and operational staff. 

Value of Virtual reality

The value of ‘low-tech’ VR solutions lies in the agility, lightness and rapidness of creating VR models. Also, as these VR representations require no technical expertise, the number of potential users increases. The easy-to-use approach made the communication and decision-making with non-technical personnel much easier, and many mistakes were avoided.

Click here for mobile VR view