HxGN SMART Build, the cloud, mobile building construction management solution, is now integrated with Leica TruView, the platform for easy and intuitive point cloud sharing and visualization. Together, the combination offers the premier solution for visual inspection of construction, such as safety, quality, and progress.
BK: Welcome to HxGN Radio. My name is Brian. Thank you for joining us today. We have Faheem Khan from Leica Geosystems and Cathi Hayes from Hexagon with us to discuss laser scanning and construction for visual inspection. Thanks for joining us.
CH: Great, thank you.
FK: Thank you for having us.
BK: Appreciate it. Hexagon SMART Build – the cloud, mobile building construction management solution is now integrated with Leica TruView – the platform for easy and intuitive point cloud sharing and visualisation. Together the combination offers the premier solution for visual inspection of construction such as safety, quality and progress. So, Faheem, tell us a little bit more about Leica TruView, first of all.
FK: Sure. Leica TruView is a web-based software that inherently delivers a rich reality capture data to end users. Its Web based. It’s light, and it was an answer to a problem where we have large amounts of 3D information that’s very hard to move around. So, we came up with a format with a technology that made it very compressed, very intuitive, and very simple to use. Essentially, allowing customers to collaborate through this light platform.
I can of take out my iPhone, iPad or just a desktop device and take measurements, communicate changes, create markups, convert this complex 3D model into a simple panoramic view of your site with a photorealistic visualisation. That’s essentially TruView, and it’s offered through multiple flavors.
BK: All right. So, Cathy how does Hexagon SMART Build incorporate TruView?
CH: So, Hexagon SMART Build imports your construction models, and once you have your construction models and the solution for project management, then we can integrate in Leica TruView, and the result is you’ll see your model to your virtual model. You’ll see the 3D scan stations that show up as little yellow triangles inside your virtual model. And you just simply click on those little scan stations and that will automatically bring up TruView.
So, you have a choice of either seeing just the scan data, or you can merge the scan data and your model together. The result is you have a virtual job site. So, you can virtually walk through the job site without any safety issues whatsoever. You can literally go in and take a look around. You can look around with a 360 view, because you’re in kind of a bubble viewer.
You’d want to do this for several reasons You’re going to look for things that are not on a certain date. So, proof of work in place, and also the quality of work. Is it there? Is it correct? Does that match up with the model or not? And, for safety, because you’ve got a record of exactly what was going on in a particular day. Then when you’re done with your visual inspections or while you’re doing your inspections if you find problems, which you always do on a construction site, then you can start a collaborative issue directly from within the system.
So, you just very easily will click on a spot where the problem is, and it’s going to open up an issue or an RFI request for information. Then you simply fill in the information about the issue or the problem or the question, and you assign it to the team member and hit the send button. Now you’ve started the collaborative issue management process that helps to speed up the entire process. If something’s wrong, you really want to get it to the right person during the right time and get it resolved very quickly.
BK: Absolutely. How did the integration come about?
CH: So, the integration was really a natural marriage between Leica Geosystems and Hexagon PPM as Geosystems was already serving the building construction market with laser scanning solutions and Hexagon SMART Build as a new AEC solution at Hexagon PPM. So, when we started to look at what we wanted the solution to be it was really a natural marriage of the two technologies to complete a fully integrated seamless workflow.
BK: What can current, and future Hexagon SMART Build customers now expect then?
CH: They can expect to see more of the same. So, more integrations, but more seamless integrations and tighter integrations between the laser sensors and Hexagon SMART Build, the collaboration platform, and project management solution. So just a lot more good stuff to come.
BK: Good. Well Faheem what does laser scanning offer building construction professionals?
FK: Multiple things, and I think SMART Build is a good realisation of some of those benefits that Cathi touched upon.
As Cathi alludes to, there are more integration opportunities and more use cases that can be supported which are released every single day.
Building professionals use laser scanning to support the full lifecycle of a construction project, from deviation detection to producing, let’s say, standards-compliant inspection reports such as the flow flatness analysis output, laser scanning professionals support, building construction professionals, and producing final 3D models as build, so that they can carry on the downstream activities. So, it’s really a technology used in multiple aspects of the lifecycle of a project.
BK: How is the integration shaping the future of the building construction industry?
FK: I think in multiple ways, and I would say building this digital twin with various types of reality capture technology provides and allows our customers to realise new use cases from that information. It really shortens project execution time, reduces uncertainty, reduces risks, and shows people are executing projects on budget and on schedule. So, there’s a lot of improvements that are possible. I think SMART Build is driving the change.
CH: Also, we see the integration between the solutions as an enabling technology for digital transformation. So, digital transformation is about breaking down the silos of data and integrated solutions that help to make business run a lot better and more efficiently. So, we see this as one of the ways to help the industry move towards digitalisation and digital transformation.
BK: Good. It sounds like an excellent integration, and I’m glad you’re working together and making this happen.
CH: Great. Thank you.
BK: Absolutely. Well thank you very much both of you for being on the show and sharing this information.
FK: Thank you.
CH: Thank you.
BK: More information on this you can go to Leica-Geosystems.com and HxGNSMARTBuild.com and of course, for more episodes of visit HxGNSPOTLIGHT.com. Have a wonderful day and thank you so much for tuning in.
