Related Links: Newforma ENR: What’s the biggest problem facing the construction industry and how can we solve it?Ian Howell, (CEO of Newforma Inc.): The construction industry is forecasted to grow to 11% of global GDP: a $12-trillion industry by 2020. McKinsey Global Cities research suggests that by 2050 we will need twice as many buildings as today.But today, project delivery is all too often a broken process. Using conventional project delivery methods you can get pretty disastrous results. BBC Headquarters in London, New York East Side Access and Chicago Millennium park projects are examples that were hundreds of millions of
Translating design intent is a worthy goal with today's 3D modeling tools, but that vision does not have full control over the reality of put-in-place construction.
Courtesy DreamHammer Inc. Related Links: Dream Hammer Inc. Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Like a real-life Tony Stark—the engineer-protagonist of the "Ironman" movies—software developer Nelson Paez has created a technology that could help augment and automate operations of everything from military weapons to construction machinery, pushing forward the unmanned-systems industry. But also like Stark, Paez doesn’t want to license his technology exclusively to the armed forces. His new software for controlling unmanned vehicles will be commercially available this August.“Exactly what happened in the mobile and in the PC industry can happen in the unmanned-systems industry,” says Paez,
COAST analyzes costs and benefits of protections in Connecticut harbor. Related Links: Blue Marble Geographics Consulting firm started by Professor Merrill leverages COAST Coastal communities pondering adaptations to climate change and sea level rise now have new software for weighing the costs and benefits of various mitigation strategies.COAST (Coastal Adaptation to Sea level rise Tool) is free software built on six years of research led by Sam Merrill, director of the New England Environmental Finance Center at the University of Southern Maine's Muskie School of Public Service, in partnership with Blue Marble Geographics, a vendor of geospatial data conversion software.
Related Links: Critics Can't Find the Logic in Many of Today's CPM Schedules The Future Of Forensic Schedule Analysis: The Good, the Hard and the Scary Successful construction projects live or die by the quality of the schedule, yet some 20 years after scheduling software became the dominant tool for tracking a project's critical path, experts say it's still not to be trusted.Andy Ness, a construction attorney for law firm Jones Day, often talks to industry groups about the trouble he finds at the intersection of law and project scheduling software. In his opinion, legal disputes that rely on forensic
Photo Courtesy of Simon Floyd/Microsoft The computer giant is hoping to ramp up sales of its Surface Pro for Windows 8 by enticing engineers with its ability to work with many types of CAD filestwo simultaneouslyand the versatile, sleek design of the device. Microsoft is also promoting its 3D Viewer for JT app. Photo Courtesy of Simon Floyd/Microsoft Related Links: Construction IT Managers Eying Microsoft Surface Pro Release Microsoft is wooing the construction industry with its new Surface Windows 8 Pro, a touch-screen tablet that can act as a desktop workstation for an engineer in the field or in transit.
Photo courtesy of DPR Construction The laybot system uses robotic-total-station technology to speed up drywall layouts before installation. The project team has set a goal for the robot to draw 1,000 linear ft per hour. Related Links: DPR's Laybot Demo (YouTube) Subs, Engineers Clamor for Collaboration at FutureTech ENR FutureTech Conference Turns Heads With Process Innovation A unique industry collaboration has produced a new robot that could increase the speed and accuracy of layouts with the help of virtual design and construction technology.Called Project Lion, the technology is the brainchild of Redwood City, Calif.-based DPR Construction and Westminster, Colo.-based Trimble.
In an increasingly digital world, AEC firms are challenged to eliminate costly and time-consuming paper-based processes. Requirements for “wet” signatures and seals interruptelectronic workflows and compel even the most digitally integrated teams and processes to fallback to paper, delaying project delivery and limiting the industry’s potential efficiency.The end-to-end adoption of a digital signatures and seals–based process can eliminate that digital interruption and significantly improve industry productivity.In current practice, AEC documents morph from digital format to print over the course of projects. Documents are created electronically, but are then printed for review or approval, wet signed, scanned back to electronic form,
Related Links: Autodesk's Brian Mathews Introduces ReCap (video) Autodesk's Suites 2014 Announcement (YouTube) Autodesk is launching a new suite of products designed to bring point-cloud scanning data into building information models with greater precision and clarity. Chief among them is a new product called ReCap, which is designed to incorporate 3D point-cloud technology into BIM with greater ease.The San Rafael, Calif.-based company says ReCap works with traditional design-based desktop software as well as cloud-based applications to create intelligent 3D models from laser scans and captured photos. "If you don't have a laser scanner, you can use your [camera] phone," said
A new photo management feature turns jobsite photos into jobsite data that is searchable in a content management system. Related Links: Viewpoint's Construction Imaging Viewpoint Reels in 4Projects While smart phones with great cameras make site documentation a cinch, it can be a challenge to manage thousands of construction photos. A new photo management feature in an enterprise content-management software update addresses the problem by turning photos into mineable data assets.The management feature allows users to tag and categorize photos by site number, employee number and user-defined tag names."Companies turn to consumer tools, like [Google's] Picasa, for photo management, but
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