This is our final week of AECCafe Voice Industry Predictions for 2022, which brings us to some exciting merging with other technologies such as GIS technology in the digital twin arena. Construction has been slow to adopt in past years, but the advent of augmented reality is changing that paradigm. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are part and parcel of the digital twin, so we will hear more from them in 2022. And what about construction project management software? Can it become easier to use, without undue training costs, and render a quicker return on investment? Take a look at what these professionals are predicting for 2022….
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.
Andrew Anagnost, President and CEO of Autodesk gave the keynote at the general session of the second Autodesk University 2021 Virtual in October. He spoke of how customers and employees had to experience a decade of change in 18 months that some were not ready for. “Even before social distancing and remote – platforms were connecting consumers and producers, and mobile devices were bringing everyone together,” said Anagnost. “Sometimes it’s felt like technology has kept us apart. We saw human ingenuity at a greater pace and scale. We face uncertainty. You make things that make tomorrow a better place. Everyone here are innovators and solve big and small problems, and technology is a force multiplier of your ingenuity.
This past week NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA RTX A2000 at SIGGRAPH 2021, a redefinition of the mainstream, professional GPU, which expands access to the power of NVIDIA RTX and represents an expansion of the NVIDIA Omniverse.
At a technical session held at the Virtual Esri User Conference 2021, in July, entitled “GIS + BIM for AEC Project Delivery & Operations,” expert presenters Steven Santovasi, Erika Boccian, Rafael Lucero and Anthony Renteria provided a look at the value of BIM and GIS for project delivery as well as for other aspects of AEC, such as schedule data, asset lifecycle management and the features of the upcoming ArcGIS GeoBIM.
While Bentley Systems has had an Academic Program for some time, it has been reawakened, according to Katriona Lord-Levins, chief success officer at Bentley. “It has been brought into the times we’re in, and to meet the needs that we have to create a talent pipelines for our customers and ourselves,” said Lord-Levins. “Not only do we want to help students develop their engineering skills that will help them in the real world, but we also want to get people excited about the possibilities of the future.”
In a webinar recently presented by Emesent, the discussion was entitled “Smarter Lidar Technology for Infrastructure and AEC: better data, greater insights.”
Peter Dickinson, project manager for Emesent and Business Development manager for the Americas Dave Jaunay introduced customers who were using Emesent’s Hovermap sensor system for various challenging environments. It has been used extensively in mining and underground environments and land surveying.
The company Emesent is based in Brisbane, Australia with a staff of 38 but rapidly growing to meet global demands. The company aims to solve the problem of collection of data – in GPS-denied or challenging environments. The need to automate the collection of data, gave birth to the Hovermap for mine and roads, tunneling, indoor mapping and search and rescue, anywhere where maintaining a signal for GNSS solutions is problematic.
Bentley Systems held the Rail Virtual Press Briefing entitled “Going Digital in Rail and Advancing BIM through Digital Twins” this week, featuring presentations from Bentley executives, Steve Cockerell, Industry Marketing Director, Rail and Transit, Eduardo Lazzarotto, Director of Project Management, and Teresa Elliott, Industry Marketing Direction, Digital Cities.
Pointfuse, a powerful modeling engine that delivers an automatic, precise and flexible way of converting the vast point cloud datasets generated by laser scanners or photogrammetry into segmented mesh models, has launched a new toolkit called Space Creator. Pointfuse Space Creator is designed to facilitate adopting laser scanning within space management, planning and utilization workflows.
In 2019, it came to my attention that there was more specific attention being paid to AEC and GIS integration, specifically two partnerships of AEC companies formed with Esri. Esri’s Kathleen Kewley discussed the resurgence of interest of GIS in the AEC space from an Esri perspective. Kewley also worked at Autodesk at one time. In addition I have included information from a webinar conducted by Autodesk senior technical marketing manager Wes Newman and AEC Solutions engineer from Esri, Rafael Fernandes, about the partnership between Esri and Autodesk.
