Lather up the sunscreen Re/Cappers, we beat the heat this week by taking a dip.
But before we get to how some aquatic athletes are embracing digital twins, let’s explore how the technology first brought a new kind of smarts to sports.
Kickoff was in 2020, when L.A.’s SoFi Stadium had the SoFine idea of becoming the first major stadium to create its digital twin. Within a year, the bold ideology spread quicker than a CrowdStrike outage.
The National Football League and Amazon Web Services announced the Digital Athlete, a digital twin-based methodology to prevent injury while optimizing performance.
Then came the bike brigade.
#1, Kyler Murray, is gonna be a whole lot better and a whole lot safer thanks to his #2. Image credit National Football League
Not only were professional cyclists the cornerstone of an exhaustive digital twin study, they were a spoke on the wheel of the Tour de France’s whole-race digital twin initiative.
A short time later, Tata Consultancy Services built the first digital heart for Des Linden, a Boston Marathon champion and Olympian x2.
And as we share this here Re/Cap, current Olympians are harnessing their own digital twins as Paris 2024 begins this week. More on that shortly.
Talk about a sprint of innovation, one augmenting injury prevention, performance, recovery, and even spectatorship.
If that’s four years…what on earth will four more yield?
SoFi Stadium digital twin first of its kind
Peer-Reviewed Paper - Digital Twin in Sport: From an Idea to Realization
How the NFL Uses Digital Twins
The NFL & AWS Multi-Year Digital Athlete Partnership
What’s Cappenin’ This Week: U.S. Swimmers twin swim for Paris prep, a robot saves hours on the jobsite with bonkers bricklaying skill, ConTech champs get crowned, U.K. rail systems age-reverse thanks to scanning & surveys, and an AEC Error of the Week named after an American founding father, but was actually a resounding bother.
Mini ‘Cappenins: 360-cam market projections, Trimble & Esri collab, a new Marques Brownlee pod, cool iPhone/iPad LiDAR uses, AI Ted Talk, and a robotics/entrepreneurial RCN Pod.
Last week on geophysical survey going back 1,900 years, recycling getting primed for disruption, Intel pushing their chips into ConTech, drones getting exhaustively ranked, and an AEC Error of the Week that made MIT say WTF.
The physics of “drag force” surrounds us. But in the water, it can be a nuisance and a half to swimmers.
However, a breakthrough from a math professor and his students may help diminish it, delighting Team U.S.A.’s Olympic swimmers set to chase gold this week.
Additional results showed that neither position affected the outcome of a shark wanting you for lunch. Image credit Scientific American/Ken Ono/Amanda Montañez
Ken Ono teaches mathematics at the University of Virginia, and despite not even needing floaties, created digital twins of swimmers August Lamb and Kate Douglass. With the help of his students, sensors called “inertial measurement units” are shedding unprecedented light on drag force, and other physics and performance data. Click below for a flawless backstroke of coverage on IoT World Today, and here for the proper study and deeper dive.
Australian robot manufacturer FBR savvily tells us that humans have been laying bricks the same way for 6,000 years…until now.
The agent of change? Its Hadrian X robot, with efficiency that rivals those Formula One pit crews changing tires in 2.6 seconds.
Hadrian might be a Roman Emperor, but he’d dream of building like this! Image credit YouTube
Now Hadrian’s not a brand new unveiling, but it has entered the U.S. for site acceptance testing in Florida. Some key highlights include a 32-meter telescopic boom arm that allows three story-high construction, a unique sketch-to-block position software, and a 500 block-per-hour lay speed. Here’s to that passed test!
Recognition always matters. But it’s imperative in industries prone to stagnation and resistance, because the true innovators have that much steeper of a hill to climb.
And therefore, theyyy aaare the chaaampions, my friends.
Freddie Mercury might have written “We Are the Champions” and constructed Napoleonic era military outfits, but…could he build a coffee shop?Image credit Fashion Files
Autodesk knows it, and it’s why their annual Construction Champions celebration is as inspiring as it is informative. Spanning construction, engineering, legal, IT, and more, all 25 champs can be found below, with splendid profiles.
Next year will mark the 200th anniversary of the rail system’s birth, which the U.K. can claim as its doing.
Unfortunately, it’s likely what the Kingdom’s not been doing that’s spawned a dire need for modernization.
God Save the Queen, sure, okay, but then can we save the rail system like, right after? Image credit Hexagon
But to Network Rail’s credit, they’re reporting for duty, even if it took years of public disdain for the rail system’s continued operation despite being in its dotage. Planning, Building, Construction Today has a thorough analysis of the varied reality capture workflows that are shepherding U.K. rail to the fountain of youth.
Boston’s John Hancock Tower and its signature, uh, plywood windows. Image credit Universal Hub
Completed in 1976, Boston’s 60-story glass giant known as the John Hancock Tower made Isaac Newton turn in his grave, when its 500-pound windows decided gravity was more of a suggestion than a law.
Yep. 65 windows popped out and plummeted to the streets below. The tower earned the charming nickname "The Plywood Palace" when hundreds of windows were replaced with wood during repairs. Talk about glass half-empty!
Oh, and the tower swayed so much in high winds that it made occupants seasick. Forget "corner office" - "barf bag dispenser" became the most coveted amenity.
And yet, all this followed early foundation & retaining wall issues that led to damaging of power lines and nearby buildings, including a church - “Watch out for that lightning bolt Pete!”
So, from the windows to the walls, and from the winds to the bends. These are all ubiquitous problems to this day…if one does not embrace reality capture technologies.
3D laser scanning could've created a hyper-accurate as-built model, catching those pesky installation issues faster than you can say "Look out below!" Drone-based reality capture could've given regular exterior check-ups; no more surprise glass showers!
Digital twins could've monitored structural movements in real-time, allowing engineers to address stability issues before they became headline news. BIM integration with reality capture data could've improved coordination between trades, potentially preventing the foundation issues that turned nearby streets into impromptu mud baths.
The John Hancock Tower eventually got its act together, but not before costing an extra $100 million and taking five bonus years to complete. Today, it stands as a gleaming reminder that in AEC, as in life, it's all fun and games until someone loses a window. So capture reality before reality captures the evening news.
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