This technology is packed with software, support programs, and comprehensive libraries of source codes and images to help designers create worlds ideally suited for their needs, whether that’s completing a mythic adventure or detailing a building. Unreal Engine and Unity, the two largest commercially available engines, are highly customizable, with frameworks allowing users to create endlessly manipulable worlds and wield Godlike control over physics, weather, and geography, among countless other features. Notably, they are also optimized to consume large amounts of heavy data and swiftly render them into interactive models. Both have been embraced by a growing number of architects who have found utility in the engines’ virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications, as well as their potential for novel forms of project management.

Seven years ago, the global architectural and design firm Populous incorporated Unreal Engine into its practice. It developed its own workflows to easily merge reams of building-information-model geometry with other proprietary data sets within the engine. Those are then hosted on local servers, and, with the help of pixel streaming, may be accessed and interacted with from any location with internet access. “Projects generate massive amounts of data, but much of it is quite bespoke and can be difficult to interpret,” says Nathan Tobeck, Populous regional digital lead. “Engines can help to structure this information and visualize it in intuitive and user-friendly ways.”

Tobeck explains that such tools proved essential to the firm’s work at the Kai Tak Sports Park in Hong Kong, a nearly 70-acre campus that finished construction in March 2025 and includes stadiums and an entertainment district. For example, Experience Studios, a Populous audiovisual- and acoustics-design agency, used the Unreal Engine during the design phase to simulate acoustical experiences across the project, as well as to model and animate minute details, like individual LEDs. “We were able to take enormous sets of data and complex geometries and visualize them simultaneously in high fidelity,” says Tobeck.

In a similar vein, the Swiss AEC software company Revizto, founded in 2008, is using a Unity-based platform, with 7 million unique lines of code, to facilitate collaboration between project stakeholders and improve efficiencies. “The building industry is one of the least digitized, and some 30 percent of construction budgets are wasted correcting errors originating in the design phase,” says founder and CEO Arman Gukasyan. “Many of these errors stem from a lack of communication between different parties, like architects, engineers, and contractors, who often work in silos.”

To combat this, Revizto aggregates data across a range of 2D- and 3D-authoring applications, like Revit, ArchiCAD, and Navisworks, into a single building model that includes automated clash-detection tools. On-site, contractors can use a computer, tablet, or smartphone to easily pull up non-editable versions of the fully detailed building model, with options for viewing it in VR or AR. Work can then be easily logged through a real-time issue tracker, with changes made to the building model by those with authoring privileges, not unlike a shared Google document.

“We’ve rendered approximately 280 terabytes of 3D models,” says Gukasyan. “For reference, the United States Library of Congress contains 20 terabytes of data. Game engines are the only technology out there that can seamlessly create such holistic views.”

The Dallas-based international firm HKS well knows the real-world benefits of incorporating virtual experiences into the design process. The firm began using the Unreal Engine in 2002 and quickly found it created opportunities to advance storytelling and better communicate ideas. That was particularly useful when HKS began working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

In May 2024, the FDA contracted the firm to support the agency’s Home as a Health Care Idea Lab, which seeks to reimagine the home as an extension of the larger health-care industry. In collaboration with a steering committee selected by the FDA, HKS interviewed key stakeholders, including individuals with diabetes, their caregivers, health-care providers, and medical-device manufacturers, to create LilyPad, a game-engine-powered VR testing ground in which architects can explore the domestic spaces of those living with the chronic disease. It generated three different virtual households—including some shared with caretaker spouses and children—that were traversable using VR headsets.

LilyPad, which is part of the larger Idea Lab, is not simply an empathy-building tool. It also provides a window into the daily considerations of those with diabetes, such as the space requirements for insulin storage, or, in more advanced cases, dialysis machines. “These are some of the features that game engines provide, which typical architectural software does not,” notes Nethra Mohan, HKS director of immersive experiences. “It has become integral to our workflow.”

The Boston-based firm Payette adopted the Unity engine into its practice in 2016, and its powerful VR and AR visualization tools have proved critical to the team’s delivery of complex building science and health-care programs. “Back then, there was an assumption that the technology would primarily be a presentation tool for clients,” says David Hamel, Payette director of design visualization. “For me, it was always about design, and we’ve embedded the technology as a tool within all of our project teams.”

In the case of Fifth Xiangya Hospital, a 5.6 million-square-foot project in Changsa, China, which is still under construction, Payette incorporated VR into decisions pertaining to the building enclosure. The firm developed five different digital facade mock-ups that the client, during design review, could scroll through and interact with from inside and outside the hospital’s building model. They could even alter weather conditions. Occupiable windows, described as the “family nest,” were also calibrated with the help of the engine, to maximize natural ventilation and solar performance while providing intimate space for family members and patients to gather. “These tools allow our designs to be more versatile and malleable and let us customize our design flow,” says Hamel.

Gaming-engine technology continues developing at exponential rates. As it does—and as tools get augmented by artificial intelligence—more advanced hardware is likely to drive and expand the tools’ capacities, and those of the architects who use them. In the years ahead, a growing embrace of improving technology could yield new, unimagined modes of architectural design, and unlock a new era in the profession.