Keeping track of construction progress is often a matter of waiting for engineers and site supervisors to walk the site and document it when they can. Getting that data into the general project pipeline is a challenge in itself.

The dog-shaped Spot robot from Boston Dynamics will be available next year with a Trimble laser scanner and GNSS antenna built in, for an out-of-the box autonomous reality capture on jobsites.

“Ideas and solutions are the easy part,” says Ricardo Khan, senior director of innovation at Mortenson Construction. It’s “the process” that is the real challenge. Khan’s midday keynote captured one of the key themes of the second day of the virtual ENR FutureTech conference—the need to identify the problems in your construction process before you start throwing technology at them

It's not enough to practice virtual design and construction anymore. Today's contractors must develop an effective data strategy beyond individual projects.

In a best-case scenario, successful and often incremental research gradually evolves into products intended to solve  construction problems.

Two new software products for rapidly converting collections of photos into 3D models and rapidly creating realistic environments for those models—one called ContextCapture, the other called LumenRT—demonstrate technical sophistication, data management techniques, rendering speed and ease of use that has reviewers taking notice but asking for more validation, too.