The modern landscape of work has changed irrevocably in the past few years. Connectivity has been making the world smaller since the advent of the internet, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid and remote work have become an accepted norm.
This gives surveyors an opportunity to go global in ways they previously couldn’t have, and working with architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies from all over the world is common. But without the advantage of physical proximity, surveyors and their clients are presented with new challenges. Fortunately, point cloud visualization software can solve a number of these problems, paving the way for streamlined, efficient collaboration between surveyors, their teams, and their clients – no matter where they’re based.
Collaboration Should Be Easy
With tight deadlines, slimming budgets, and the need for accuracy and high-quality work, projects need streamlined collaboration from start to finish. From design to build to maintenance, all stakeholders from engineers to architects to builders to facility owners need to be on the same page. Surveyors can facilitate this easy collaboration by bringing 3D reality scanning to the table, providing accurate representations of sites as they actually exist.
But once surveyors provide point cloud data, related information needs to be readily available for everyone involved. With geographically dispersed teams, centralizing all this data is crucial. Whether it’s original CAD designs, as-designed BIM models, build changes, maintenance records, or operational KPIs, teams can no longer afford to have information strewn about on various hard drives and paper files. Instead, collaboration should be seamless – someone needs to bring point clouds, BIM models, designs, and pertinent information into one, centralized source.
Size Problems: Point Cloud Data Sharing
Centralizing data is also the key to solving one of the most frustrating problems with point cloud data and robust 3D models: size. Point clouds are necessarily large – so large in fact, that early scan data had to be shared by mailing entire hard drives around the country. This process is less than ideal for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, transporting hard drives is risky – jostling can easily render data unusable. Second, it’s expensive to produce and mail many hard drives. Most importantly, though – this kind of data sharing decentralizes information. An engineer in New York may be working with one version of a project while a builder in Washington references another. Who’s to say which version is more current? When there are updates, a whole new batch of hard drives must go out. This one issue – data size – is the major obstacle to real, streamlined collaboration.
Point Cloud Visualization Software
JP Interactive Viewer solves these problems with one simple concept: centralize all point cloud and BIM data and make it cloud accessible, connecting all pertinent information to an accurate, up-to-date, 3D model, or digital twin. The digital twin represents a job site as it is now, with down to the screw accuracy and all pertinent information tied to the project and to individual assets. Now, surveyors can provide AEC clients with the perfect solution for flexible, interactive, easy collaboration.
If you’re ready to learn more about how JPIV can fuel smooth collaboration, contact JP Global Digital or request your free JPIV trial today.
