Archive for the ‘IoT’ Category
Acquisition of Viewpoint by Trimble Aims to Extend Construction Management Offering
Thursday, April 26th, 2018Strategic Relationship Between Trimble and VolkerWessels Promises BIM Innovations
Friday, January 12th, 2018AECCafe Voice provides some insightful comments from Jon Fingland, general manager, Collaboration Solutions at Trimble and René de Groot, BIM program manager at VolkerWessels leading construction firm and global player in the field of information and communications technologies, about this week’s announcement of a strategic relationship to standardize VolkerWessels’ projects on a key set of Trimble construction technologies. The collaboration is designed to leverage each company’s core capabilities to drive innovations in Building Information Management (BIM) technology and improve the management and predictability of building construction and real estate projects.
AECCafe Predictions for 2018
Thursday, January 4th, 2018Happy New Year!
Approaching a new year, the technologies that we saw growing during 2017 may unfold into 2018 to become realized with deeper understanding.
AECCafe 2017 Year in Review
Thursday, December 21st, 2017Looking back over 2017, AEC milestones and ongoing challenges preside over the year. It was exciting this year to visit Singapore, a nation/state/city that is truly a “smart nation,” as well as a “smart city,” employing more technologies that are linked and integrated than generally used in design projects.
In terms of adoption of products, the year has seen many ways software companies help customers adopt new workflow processes, product releases and maintain upgrades.
Interview: Building Design Modeling at Bentley Systems
Friday, December 15th, 2017This interview was conducted with Andy Smith director product management – Building Design Modeling and Santanu Das, senior vice president, Design & Modeling, at Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2017 thought leadership conference, Singapore.
Special AECCafe Report: BIM Interoperability: Emphasis on Data Not Tools
Thursday, November 2nd, 2017When everyone on a team uses a different BIM software, it can be painful to maintain accurate model versions, control user access, compare versions and analyze different models. On big projects, there are many teams coming together, all using whatever BIM technologies they have been tasked with and making all those interoperate, multiplying the challenge several fold.
“Going Digital” at Bentley 2017 “Year in Infrastructure” in Singapore
Thursday, October 19th, 2017Partnerships make the world go round.
Or so it would seem from the recent announcements made by Bentley Systems at their 2017 Year in Infrastructure Conference held in Singapore this past week. The event drew record numbers, primarily from Southeast Asia, China and India. 130 journalists also were in attendance.
Coming Soon: AECCafe Special Report on Interoperabiiity for BIM
Thursday, September 28th, 2017When everyone on a team uses a different BIM software, it can be painful to maintain accurate model versions, control user access, compare versions and analyze different models. On big projects, there are many teams coming together, all using whatever BIM technologies they have been tasked with and making all those interoperate, multiplying the challenge severalfold.
3D Reality Mesh Models Become Smarter with Bentley’s New Reality Modeling Technology
Thursday, April 20th, 2017Recent advancements in reality modeling have made the technology, which was once limited to highly skilled, well-trained individuals and costly equipment, now accessible to everyone. Faraz Ravi, a Bentley fellow and project manager for reality modeling spoke with AECCafe Voice about Bentley’s new innovations in reality modeling technology which greatly simplify the process of capturing, processing, and using data to create engineering-ready 3D models.
Ease-of-Use, Owner Involvement are Big Themes at Rand IMAGINiT
Thursday, February 16th, 2017Carl Storms, Senior Applications Expert, for Rand IMAGINiT and Matt Mason, director of Software Development, for Rand IMAGINiT spoke with AECCafe at Autodesk University in November 2016 about the direction of the AEC industry. Rand IMAGINiT is a consulting and software development firm and Autodesk Partner. Carl Storms is “out in the trenches,” working with real world problems in AEC while Matt Mason is behind the scenes in the software development department, realizing the solutions to those challenges.
When asked about popular products and trends in AEC, Storm said, “Dynamo and visual programming are still a big thing. It’s been around a couple of years and now people more comfortable with it. Autodesk’s latest release of Dynamo Player is for people who are maybe not well versed in technology. They can just hit a button and play something. It’s like a playlist, you can pick a track you want to play. It accesses the information inside of your Revit model. It will, for example, have your text go from lower case to upper case with just the click of a button. It really gives people the benefit of using the technology without spending a lot of time learning the programming.”
According to Matt Mason, “Dynamo is still used by the power users, but to make it available to the rest of the people in the firm it needs to be more approachable. It’s been a challenge historically because you had to open the power users’ big complicated graph and understand it. From a usability standpoint, for the other 95% who aren’t at the level of doing Dynamo, it really helps democratize and leverage the Dynamo concept. The players can take advantage of the power users’ skills and have pretty much on-demand access.”
“Another big thing is augmented and virtual realities,” said Storms. “It’s now in more client and consumer based products. You have things as simple as Google Cardboard where you spend $12 to get the little lens and use your own smartphone, to high end devices, but they all allow you to immerse yourself in the data. Whether it’s a virtual reality type of device where you get immersed in the world of your model, you can walk around in your model and see what’s going on. Or you bring the reality into your reality so you can still see people and have conversations. You can see your interaction. People have been talking about it and have lots of thoughts and ideas for using it, and it will become more mainstream.”