The Re/Cap #1: Inaugural Issue

March 19, 2024
Ellis Malmgren

Welcome to The Re/Cap, the Reality Capture Network’s weekly reality capture recap! (Say it three times.)

This industry moves fast. Something something Moore’s Law. Your life moves fast. And this weekly newsletter will read accordingly.

Subscribe to stay informed, work smarter, enrich your community, and learn about an AEC Error of the Week which reality capture would have totally mitigated or saved outright. Heck, you may even chuckle at least once per reading/on-toilet glance!

Most of these techy snippets will be specific to reality capture; but we’ll deviate every now and then, for all you goggle-adorning, robot-loving, metaverse-awaiting, 3D printing savants. If it’s tech and a superb story, it gets Re/Capped!

In this inaugural Re/Cap: digital twin users get a manual, historic preservation of early 1900s African American schools, the forecast of cars looks point cloudy, health care looks to VR, and much more!

The Digital Twin Consortium Goes Full Sherpa

Sometimes, success is as simple as a great guide – just ask a Mount Everest conqueror how they feel about the Sherpas!Site civil projects and their respective engineers just got their own version of a sherpa, courtesy of the Digital Twin Consortium. The preeminent twin authority published an exhaustive user guide for applying reality capture to site civil projects.

The Digital Twin Consortium basically did this for site civil projects.
The Digital Twin Consortium basically did this for site civil projects. Image credit BBC News.

Per the press release linked above, it features among many other benefits:

  • Reality capture devices used for site civil projects
  • Standards, compliance, and specifications
  • Future use cases, trends, and technologies supporting digital twins, and an array of other discernments.

Historic Black Schools in Virginia are Disappearing. So People Got Scanning.

Will Rourk and his graduate students survey the outside of the Newtown Rosenwald School in anticipation of scanning it.
Surveying and scanning a Rosenwald School in Newtown, Virginia. Image credit Dan Addison, UVA Communications.

University of Virginia alumni Jody Lahendro and Will Rourk share three fiery passions: architectural history, culture, and scanning. Their current project? Surveying, scanning, and preserving a Rosenwald School for African Americans that was built in partnership with Booker T. Washington 112 years ago. All for people to experience it via virtual reality walkthrough. Read the remarkable full story with plenty of scanning talk and profiles of the team profiles of the team.

Reality Capture Hits the Gas on Cutting Emissions

More point clouds = less environmental harm.
More point clouds = less environmental harm. Image credit just-auto.com.

Automotive companies are doing respectable jobs in accelerating our greener future. But there’s an 18-wheeler of a roadblock for practically all of them; manufacturing. The wonderful news is that big rig may be slowly shrinking to an F-150, thanks to mobile mapping and digitization. Full story on the tech advancing a zero-emission future for the automotive industry.

Merck Finds a Cure for Inefficiency: Virtual Reality

Merck has realized that the power of technology is VIRTUALLY unstoppable.
Merck has realized that the power of technology is VIRTUALLY unstoppable. Image credit TopDigital.

The $320 billion-dollar pharmaceutical titan is no stranger to digital transformation, but a recent endeavor ties directly to AEC in order to achieve better, faster research. Read about their partnership with New Jersey-based tech consultant Invonto to simulate the equipment and floor plan of a new laboratory.

AEC ERROR OF THE WEEK

The Big Dig in Boston, The Olympics of “What Could Go Wrong?”
The Big Dig in Boston, The Olympics of “What Could Go Wrong?” Image credit Appel

Boston’s Big Dig, completed in 2006, had 2.9 million cubic meters of concrete…and almost as many problems. Its original budget of $2.8 billion ballooned to approximately $22 billion. Would proper reality capture use have prevented or mitigated every issue of the hundreds it had? No. But there would certainly be a few billion saved that could have supplied multiple “Free Chowder Fridays” for all of Beantown.

Mini Re/Caps, Podcasts, and Media

Happy capturing, and we’ll see you in next week’s Re/Cap! If you liked what you just read, a share will do the industry a built-world of good!

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