Image Courtesy Core studio | Thornton Tomasetti Output from a hackathon where four people designed different parts of a building. Related Links: Mobile 3D-Model Viewer, Mark-Up Software Now Available Makerbot's New 3D Digitizer Turns Physical Objects Digital A collaboration tool that allows multiple authors of a Grasshopper 3D design model to stream geometry to the web in real time is available at no cost by downloading a plug-in. The tool, called Platypus, works like a chat room for parametric geometry and allows on-the-fly 3D model mashups in a browser.Since Platypus's late-April release, there have been hundreds of downloads from www.3dplatyp.us,

Related Links: Blog Post by Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO Autodesk's Acquisition of Get The Point Technology Weds Field Layout to Design Files Autodesk is making a big commitment to 3D printing with three recent moves to put its software and services, and even some new hardware, at the center of that industry.Autodesk CEO and President Carl Bass blogged on May 14 that later this year the company will launch an open-source software platform called Spark for driving 3D printers. He also announced the company will start selling its own 3D printer, whose design will be open-sourced as part of the

Image Courtesy Openroute Inc. OpenRoute's wireless signal repeaters, housed in "yellow Pelican cases" for durability, can be strapped onto anything, from cranes to pillars. Image Courtesy Openroute Inc. As a building rises, repeaters are added, one by one, around the site to ensure continued wireless connectivity and scalability to reach every level of the evolving building. Related Links: OpenSource's Website Two Ways to Quickly Connect to a Remote Jobsite A new hardware system allows a jobsite's wireless signal to grow with construction. Called OpenRoute, it functions as a series of synchronized wireless signal repeaters, strategically placed and moved around the

Image Courtesy of Bentley Mixed Bag 3D model of layers of buried utilities is auto-generated from many sources and corrected and annotated by object Related Links: Latest Bentley App Brings Geospatial Data to the Field Bentley: BIM Also Means Information Mobility Bentley Systems' latest addition to its suite of infrastructure design software helps utilities gather everything they know about existing systems and assigns reliability values as a foundation for future planning.The product—referred to as SUE, for subsurface utilities engineering—uses BIM-style tools to create intelligent 3D models of combined subsurface utility systems, which it does by automating the use of legacy

+ Image Related Links: American Institute of Steel Construction buildingSMARTalliance The American Institute of Steel Construction is ramping up efforts—at least on the technical side—to ease data exchange among all entities in the structural-steel supply chain. The move is part of AISC's push to help building teams save time and increase efficiency, productivity and accuracy in structural-steel production.AISC reports headway in building- information-modeling-based automated fabrication and automated steel purchasing and limited progress in steel BIM review, instead of shop-drawing review. But the sharing of steel BIMs between the engineer of record and the steel fabricator—to eliminate duplicate BIM-building efforts—is still

Photo Courtesy of Sumitomo Mitsui Construction With digital, high-definition cameras and LED lightsevery one blinking in a unique, identifiable patternresearchers can achieve automated, highly accurate, 3D positioning data day and night. Related Links: Haruyama and Nagamoto's White Paper Details the System Video: LED Technology Today Six years after a Japanese construction company deployed a light-emitting-diode surveying system to collect continuous, three-dimensional positioning readings, researchers say the technology is now cheaper, easy-to-operate and an automated version of total station systems. It also performs in the dark or light 24 hours a day.The work is the brainchild of Shinichiro Haruyama, professor at

By Tom Sawyer Attendees at ENR's FutureTech conference gained a deeper appreciation of the technology shifts that are changing the character of the built world as the needs of the occupants change. Related Links: Construction Tech Companies Forecast a Cloudy Future Exploring the Future of Construction Through Science-Fiction Stories It is axiomatic that accurate forecasting should build on an understanding of the past and, particularly, of the economic drivers that shape the way we live, work and produce, said Paul D. Saffo, a technology forecaster, in a keynote presentation at ENR's FutureTech conference in San Francisco on March 19. "As

Related Links: Robots on the Jobsite Advancing in Construction Can a Robot Do Your Job? It Depends Within five to 10 years, a majority of construction workers will be interacting with real-time data on projects and deploying wearable, pervasive computing devices on jobsites, according to a survey of ENR readers.But readers are split on how much of a difference in productivity will result from all that real-time data and gadgetry.The survey went out to about 54,000 subscribers of ENR's FutureTech newsletter in early March and garnered 317 replies, three-quarters of which completed all the questions. (The results were unveiled on

In order to match the challenge of creating high performance buildings, the construction industry needs to move toward high performance construction, says McGraw Hill Construction senior director Stephen Jones. During his remarks to open ENR’s Futuretech conference March 18-19 in San Francisco, Jones said the industry should foster “the industrialization of construction to reduce risk and uncertainty and get better designs out there.”Lean construction practices are paramount to a high performance construction strategy, but awareness and adoption of lean techniques is lagging. According to a McGraw Hill Construction study conducted in 2013, 30% of firms surveyed had not heard of

Photo Courtesy WaterFX Pilot project plant in California's Central Valley is about to be scaled up to a commercial-grade system, with little added load on the electric grid. Related Links: WaterFX Profile of Panoche Water District from the Pacific Institute After a little more than eight months of operation, a pilot plant that uses solar energy to distill contaminated groundwater in the parched farmlands of California's Central Valley has performed so well that at least one expert is seeing a new gold rush on the way."We are actually sitting on a wealth of groundwater that just needs treatment," says Dennis