The Perot Museum of Nature and Science located in Dallas, Texas, won a Be Inspired “Special Recognition Award” in the category “Innovations in Comprehensive BIM” at the Year In Infrastructure 2013 (YII2013) event held in London in October. The building, designed by Morphosis Architects, is very striking in that it is embues the visitor with the feeling of the natural environment of Texas, with its earthy use of rocks, stone, concrete and sedimentation of the earth layering.
Archive for the ‘integrated project delivery’ Category
Perot Museum of Nature and Science design mirrors Texas’ natural environment
Tuesday, November 26th, 2013Apple’s new proposed spaceship headquarters
Thursday, November 21st, 2013“Definitely the Mother Ship has landed here in Cupertino.”
Apple’s proposed new headquarters is a spaceship-like structure design that has just received approval from the city of Cupertino to go ahead with the building.
The 2.8 million-square-foot Star Trek clone, shaped like an enormous donut, is expected to be situated on a site in a man-made forest on the northeast corner of Cupertino. Apple Campus 2 will be located where HP and Compaq used to be located and has gotten the okay to go ahead with building from the city next month. While the entire campus maintains a space like-modern-age theme, the most prominent building is the big four-story donut designed by architect Norman Foster of Foster and Partners, who has designed many notable and extraordinary buildings including the Gherkin in London and the Reichstag restoration in Berlin.
Stefan Behling, a Foster and Partners architect on the project, said that the building is “one of the most environmentally sustainable projects on this scale anywhere in the world.”
Autodesk Vehicle Tracking Software 2014
Wednesday, November 20th, 2013Dan Philbrick, senior product line manager in the infrastructure division at Autodesk, spoke with AECWeekly regarding the company’s new Autodesk Vehicle Tracking 2014 software for vehicle simulation, based on field-proven technology assets recently acquired from Savoy Computing Services in the UK.
Cancer Treatment Centre in the UK offers “Care Villages” for healing
Friday, November 15th, 2013The winner of the “Innovation in Building” Category in the Bentley Be Inspired Awards held in London during the “Year in Infrastructure 2013” event this month was the Cancer Treatment Centre for Guy’s and St. Thomas Hospitals, London.
Recap of Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2013 Conference
Thursday, November 7th, 2013Bentley’s annual Year in Infrastructure event is a showcase for the company’s Be Inspired award winners in various industry categories, as well as an opportunity for the company to demonstrate some of its new directions and product releases. Some of the big topics this year were the introduction of Bentley’s Cloud Services added to the platform, the SaaS Project Sharing Services, the potential of a health information model, the new Innovation page where users can view and comment on new research and development.
Newforma software integration announced
Tuesday, November 5th, 2013Bob Batcheler, executive vice president of strategy, Newforma, talked with AECCafe Voice about the new Newforma software for project information management.
Newforma software for project information management arose in response to the need for ways to bridge the disparate systems that architects, engineers, and builders use to manage projects and project information. As a result, integration has always been an important part of the software’s design. (more…)
Dell Precision M3800 ultra thin and light workstation announced
Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013Pat Kannar, Director of Product Marketing, Dell Precision, talked about the release of the Dell Precision M3800 ultra thin and light 15-inch workstation that represents the last product in their portfolio line of ultra workstations. Kannar said this is the first thin and light workstation in the market.
“This M3800 most exciting platforms we’ve delivered,” Kannar said. “It fits in end-to-end solutions, and is one of the most smartly designed platforms for engineering, design, and for those creating products and energy systems.”
Customers have wanted a thinner and lighter workstation without compromising performance, and this workstation delivers all that. “It has all the traditional components you have in a workstation, quadcore, CPUs, professional graphics, NVIDIA, great memory and storage options put it in a form factor 18 millimeters thin,” said Kannar.
The M3800 is less than ¾ inch thin (18 mm) and weighs 4.15 pounds, with dual cooling to keep it running cool and quiet, and up to 10 hours six minutes of battery life. It has NVIDIA Optimus graphics technology that also maximizes the battery life. NVIDIA provides QHD 3200×1800 pixel display with multi-touch capability. The chassis is made from anodized aluminum and carbon fiber chassis which is very lightweight and durable. (more…)
Autodesk InfraWorks 360 Pro debuts
Wednesday, August 7th, 2013Paul McRoberts, vice president of Autodesk’s Infrastructure Business, talked this week about the company’s announcement today of Autodesk InfraWorks 360 Pro, that offers the latest 3D modeling, visualization and cloud-based collaboration technologies to address the estimated $30 trillion gap worldwide between desperately needed infrastructure and the funding required to deliver it.
To expand access to the critical BIM solutions that design professionals need to address this challenge, the new solution is available via a quarterly plan, making it ideal for firms to test-drive Autodesk 360 Pro, or use it for short-term project needs.
Those users who have been aware of the Autodesk InfraWorks environment will note that the product goes to the next level with cloud capability and the ability to integrate lots of disparate Big Data. “We are still struggling with how to manage this Big Data world,” said Paul McRoberts. “Things have been focused around the single user, GIS analyst, GIS technician, drafter, a very expert oriented environment. As were building out the InfraWorks 360 environment, we ask how does that environment get us to change?”
Startup Owlized teams with Autodesk for urban design and infrastructure visualization
Tuesday, July 30th, 2013“San Francisco-based startup Owlized has teamed with Autodesk to help “bring the symphony alive” for public stakeholders and non-technical policymakers when considering infrastructure and urban design proposals. […]Owlized and Autodesk recently debuted a new device called the “OWL” for San Francisco’s Better Market Street project [ ….]The OWL looks like a traditional coin-operated retro viewfinder that we’ve all seen and used at scenic lookouts. With all its potential flexibility, the OWL’s potential for urban design and infrastructure visualization is vital for better city planning through civic engagement.”
Future San Francisco Market Street Comes into View – Triple Pundit
Bentley Map Mobile debuts for infrastructure professionals
Thursday, July 25th, 2013The first version of Bentley Map Mobile, a Bentley app that empowers infrastructure professionals to share Bentley Map geospatial information with field technicians via Android-based mobile devices, was released recently.
In a conversation with Richard Zambuni, global marketing director, geospatial and utilities at Bentley Systems, he said that the Bentley Map Mobile project was initiated through an engagement with a telecommunications company who requested they start development work on it. “Although it works with any class of infrastructure that is managed geospatially it was an engagement with telecommunications firm that initiated the project,” said Zambuni. It is “very much a first release, and it will be available in the future on other operating systems. For upcoming releases, we are looking at including redlining, inserting special objects, editing object attributes, to support different workflows. Bentley is working on closed loop workflows in the cloud for bringing in data. Users can publish spatial data as an i-model and it can be consumed on the Android device. They can use very large datasets and the performance is excellent.”
“A lot of our users will want to support specific workflows with this technology on mobile devices, so we have an SDK to help them develop what they need,” said Zambuni. “This will be able to be tailored to individual organizations. We will provide redlining, and object editing out of the box in future releases, but the more specific forms-based interaction with the data will probably have to be created by the users themselves using consultants. Some will have programming resources in house.”
Spatial information on smart devices is something Bentley has been moving toward for some time as the consumerization of physical formats has coincided with the ability to view and interact with very large datasets. Plans for further releases on different operating systems are in the works; next on the list is the iOS platform.
Bentley Mobile Map is available publicly but users can only publish to Bentley Map Mobile from Bentley software. There is a free publishing utility to create i-models which works with Bentley Map Enterprise, Bentley Utilities Designer, and Bentley’s communications products, including Bentley Coax, Bentley Copper, Bentley Fiber, and Bentley Inside Plant. These are Bentley’s geospatial products that are application-specific.
“Although you can’t publish from Esri products such as ArcGIS or ArcMap directly,” explains Zambuni. “You can bring in shapefiles to Bentley Map and publish out through Bentley Map to Bentley Map Mobile, but you have to bring the data into a DGN environment to publish out.”
When this technology is deployed , it will mostly be at a departmental level to support departmental workflows, which may require that users develop their own “flavor” of the app on top of the SDK. The SDK enables organizations to make the app as light and simple to use as possible – to be used in the field by many people inside and outside of the organization who are not GIS professionals, such as construction and engineering teams, installation and maintenance teams, and inspectors.
From the press release:
Bentley Map Mobile provides the following functionality:
- fast access to large geospatial data sets;
- easy-to-use, standard tablet-based gestures such as pinch to zoom, swipe to drag, point to select features, etc.;
- simple query mechanism to look up features quickly;
- GPS integration for fast location in the field;
- Google Maps integration for directions to located features (with network connection);
- disconnected, view-only operation for access anywhere, without a network connection;
- raster and vector display.
The advantages of Bentley Map Mobile include:
- improving the quality of decisions made by field personnel by providing quick access to accurate, up-to-date asset information;
- increasing worker safety by having access to current information as well as information on adjacent utilities that might have an impact on the work they are completing;
- increasing the return on investment in geospatial data by making this valuable data available to an entirely new group of users.
Bentley Map Mobile is available to all Bentley Passport holders at no additional charge and can be accessed at www.bentley.com/BentleyMapMobile.