LAS VEGAS — The Trimble Dimensions Conference in Las Vegas offers a rare glimpse into the construction industry’s future. This year’s gathering featured innovative tech on display, underscoring a drive to redefine how projects are managed and built. Central to this vision was Nathan Patton, Trimble’s Product Marketing Manager for Construction Technology, who shared insight into the possibilities that AI, robotics, and data capture bring to construction. With his background as a former surveyor, Patton is as much a storyteller of Trimble’s journey as he is an advocate for its transformative potential.
Patton’s path to Trimble is notable. Before joining the company, he was a surveyor using Trimble’s equipment on job sites. “I was a customer of Trimble long before I ever came to work here,” he explained. This gives him a unique perspective as someone who understands the practical realities of Trimble’s technologies and what they mean for the people using them. His role today involves taking Trimble’s sophisticated innovations — tools like terrestrial scanning, mobile mapping, and cloud data management — and distilling them into solutions that construction firms can understand, trust, and deploy.
With the Trimble Reality Capture Platform Service, users can facilitate seamless collaboration with a central source of data for visualization, issue tracking, model comparison, measuring and more — all inside Trimble Connect’s web-based interface.
Nathan Patton, Product Manager, Trimble spoke with AECCafe Voice about the FieldLink MR, a new mixed reality solution for construction layout that runs on the Trimble XR10 with HoloLens 2.
Trimble Introduces Mixed Reality for Construction Layout with FieldLink MR
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.
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.
