Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of AECCafe, recently interviewed Jason Hallett, CEO of Digital Construction Works (DCW).
Founded in 2019, DCW is a separate services company offering digital automation, integration and digital twinning services and fit-for-purpose solutions. The aim is to simplify digital transformation for the construction industry. DCW solutions span every phase of the project – from planning to construction and operations through to asset management – creating a digital thread that connects technologies and workflows. Because DCW is a completely new separate company, it can be agnostic to technology and process improvement. This way, technology follows the operational process change but doesn’t lead it.
Sanjay: Thank you so much for joining us, Jason. Tell us a little bit about Digital Construction Works?
Jason: DCW was founded in 2019 as a joint venture between Topcon group and Bentley Systems. Our staff is comprised of construction industry subject matter experts and application developers. We’re focused on trying to really integrate the technologies that are out there used on construction projects and make the flow of information more seamless while executing construction.
President of AECCafe Sanjay Gangal spoke recently with Montreal-based Nick Fonta, General Manager, XR division at Autodesk about Autodesk’s XR immersive experience and the company’s acquisition of The Wild, an immersive remote collaboration platform for architecture, design, and enterprise teams.
Sanjay: Thank you so much for joining us, Nick. So, tell us about Autodesk XR Solutions.
Nick: For sure. Autodesk has an interesting journey or history when it comes to XR. We started in the 1990s with our first project around XR, and it was a full 3D immersive experience with AutoCAD data that people could navigate into, a little bit like a first-person shooter. You could interact with basic interactions with the AutoCAD scene at the time. That was a project in prototype. And since then, we’ve been doing a lot of things, we have a research group who continued testing the limits of those technologies, but more recently, we’ve had a few things maybe worth noting. The first thing being about seven years ago, we moved into the real-time engine business, if you will, with our own engine, which was called Stingray. And we also built a first product in our trying to understand what that meant phase for Autodesk, and the product was called Revit Live. And both Stingray and Revit Live were our first real experiments to try to understand how real-time technologies, VR, and AR can can add value and solve real problems for our customers in the AEC and manufacturing spaces.
We tried a lot of things there, and then finally, a lot more recently, we have products today that support mostly VR, a little bit of AR as well in a portfolio. We have VRED, which targets mainly the automotive industry. VRED is a very high end, high resolution, high level of fidelity when it comes to imageries and rendering. It comes with the collaborative VR experience, so you can bring multiple designers to review, do the design reviews typically on cars, but it’s also used in other manufacturing industries. So that’s one, as a product, it’s been around for about five years, maybe a bit more, and is still around. It’s very successful, we’re seeing a lot of adoption and growth there, and we also have a capability called Create VR that allows designers to sketch and ideate in VR from scratch in a 3D space for a very creative way of transferring your ideas as a designer into the 3D world. Recently we released a capability out of Fusion products, one of our Hero products in manufacturing that allows any Fusion model to be experienced in AR, experienced on iOS with a publish to a USDZ. This is what we have today. This is where this all journey started, maybe a couple of months ago, and I’m sure we’re going to talk more about that now.
It is an interesting time to be working in the AEC industry, and I feel grateful for having experienced the past 25+ years immersed in it from an editorial perspective.
For 2022, it looks like construction trends are improving, with expectations high for increased infrastructure spending. Trimble is looking forward to increased collaboration capabilities, BIM models and digital twins amassing enormous quantities of data to provide a more streamlined construction experience, and what it takes to attract the next generation of workers.
Pete Large, Senior Vice President, Civil Infrastructure Sector at Trimble
And of course, sustainability and environmental concerns for the construction industry are an urgent focus for all aspects of the industry moving forward.
Predictions for the coming year are shaped by history and the current moment, and where we see the future unfolding. Both Adam Klatzin, vice president, Business Development for the iTwin Platform at Bentley Systems and Allison Scott, director of Construction Thought Leadership, Autodesk Construction Solutions, write about what realities have shaped catalysts for current and future development.
At the heart of content creation are the machines that we run programs on.
On the cutting edge as usual, NVIDIA presented at CES a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, bringing with them a plethora of new developments. Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business, announced more than 160 thin-and-light laptops using RTX 30 Series GPUs in a smorgasbord of mobile designs.
Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business
Much of 2021’s important news had to do with response to climate change, coupled with the Covid-19 response for businesses. Technologies have been in place for many years to respond, but the time is now, and actually the time is yesterday, to respond to these critical social and environmental issues. Digital twin technology and artificial intelligence are front and center in addressing these challenges. Reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a major priority for most organizations and technologies are being lined up to address this priority.
This year’s online Bentley Year In Infrastructure Conference has a somewhat different format, with the emphasis being on the awards distributed from the get-go, rather than at the end of the event. Replicating the experience of finalists’ presentations and speaking to the finalists in person were part of a tradition at YII. Not to mention an awards dinner that we all used to look forward to in person pre-pandemic, in such exotic locations as Singapore, London or Amsterdam.
CEO Jensen Huang presented the keynote at the recent GTC21 NVIDIA Conference, November 8-11, sharing with the audience the importance of accelerated computing and much more. The announcements were so prolific and not all pertinent to the AEC industry, thus I will share those that would be of most interest to our audience. One of the most profound announcements came at the end of the talk, wherein Huang announced that they are building a digital twin of the earth.
Zac Hays, head of product, preconstruction for Autodesk Construction Solutions, spoke this week with AECCafe Voice about Autodesk’s new BuildingConnected, a building platform to which new building project data can be posted and shared.
Zac Hays, head of product, preconstruction for Autodesk Construction Solutions
