The promises of reality capture technology – to increase ROI, to create digital representations of real-world projects, and to increase the accuracy and fidelity of models – are beginning to be realized across industries. While these promises are common, this session will look at some of the challenges that still remain to getting these benefits from reality capture. Where are the stumbling blocks and bottlenecks? What opportunities are there for improving capture processes, and what lessons can be learned from previous shortcomings?

Session moderated by Emily Olman, Hopscotch Interactive

Augmented Reality for the Built World

Every enterprise involved in designing, building, and maintaining our world's infrastructure is experiencing the whirlwind of the spatial-data revolution. The convergence of GIS and BIM have brought us to the dawn of the age of the Digital Twin. However, the vast amounts of location-intelligence data generated during the design/build phase, remain underutilized and even lost at, and after turnover. For owner-operators, the real ROI of the digital twin remains elusive and difficult to achieve.

Augmented Reality (AR) is perfectly suited to bridge the gap between the location intelligence created during the design/build phase and the huge amount of associated, yet siloed data in a vast array of disparate systems.

AR can distribute this information and create a connected ecosystem of people and information. Imagine traveling around your Jobsite, campus, factory, or city-wide infrastructure, seeing hyperlinks all around, providing instant access to critical design, operation, and business information.

We will review the basics of AR technology. Learn about the (coding and no-code) tools available today to begin building your own AR solution. We will go on a deep dive into the "State-of-AR" in the built-world space and some of the leading off-the-shelf solutions available now. See demonstrations of AR connected to spatial data systems. Hear from organizations about their experiences implementing and using AR solutions connected to the built infrastructure.

William Wallace, AR Mavericks, Inc.

Reality Capture with Animation For Engineering Deliverables

Often working in aging facilities (oil and gas, water, chemical plants) where existing drawings, models or information is difficult to come by, we saw the advantage in collecting highly accurate and detailed as found conditions through 3D Lidar scanning to create virtual worlds to utilize in our projects. Using this enriched data has increased the quality of our deliverables and changed our overall workflow to now also include creating animations to virtually showcase our options and designs as they come to life. 

Many of the existing tools that our designers are using (Navisworks, ReCap, AutoCAD etc) can assist with creating basic animations and videos utilizing point cloud data combined with CADD data to showcase the proposed new design or construction projects. This decreases errors, improves our QA/QC process and allows us to showcase different options virtually to our clients and internal teams. Creating a virtual world with animation allows us to see the new design or construction sequence using a variety of tools (Oculus, HoloLens, AR through phones and tablets etc) that make the new design different from the old 2D paper deliverable to now allow the new concept to come to life as it jumps from the page into a fully immersive virtual design. As the return on investment grows we are increasing our capabilities and getting into more complex animations using higher end gaming software (Unity, 3DS max etc.).

Mark Franklin, Kleinfelder

Virtual Field Visits

The presentation will focus on advances of visualizing large scale point cloud data in a VR environment for collaborative virtual field visits. Teaming with our partner firm Akular, current systems of rendering point clouds and GIS data in VR headsets will be discussed and demonstrated. Potential future applications of these system will be discussed related to not only client facing applications but also production efficiency gains through inclusion of new toolsets that allow for extraction and QA in the virtual environment.

Sandor Laszlo, WGI and Martin Rapos, AKULAR

Using XR for Collaborative Design Reviews

Aligning on building projects with distributed teams and relevant stakeholders can be difficult for AEC firms in today's remote-first work environment. Team members can be forced to rely on traditional meetings or Zoom calls for design reviews, and then drawings or partial models when evaluating plans. This can result in improper reviews, misunderstandings, and inaccurate predictions of potential issues.

To overcome these obstacles, learn how your firm can streamline collaboration by experiencing your 3D models from Revit, Navisworks, and Autodesk Construction Cloud in extended reality (XR). By using XR, AEC teams can visualize designs in 3D at a 1:1 scale to get a better sense of what it's like to move through the project making it easier to track issues and detect clashes. Through virtual reality (VR) teams can universally access BIM models from anywhere simultaneously, allowing for more data-rich conversations, and better-informed alignment.

Nicolas Fonta, Autodesk, Inc.