Bentley Systems, a software developer for the design and operation of infrastructure for water and transportation worldwide, has combined drone and augmented reality (AR) technology to better capture the progress of construction.
How the drones and AR fit together is perfectly demonstrated in the video below. As the drone flies up and circles the property, AR tech is used to picture what the additional building could result in and what it would look like. “Using standard hand-held augmented reality, you could walk around the site with a tablet and you could view live augmentation of the site which would facilitate the identification of mistakes and delays.”
None of this is real-time, but it is said that as technology improves there could be a possibility that this will all be live. There does need to be consideration for the amount of work that goes into software like this, as it is rather lengthy. What happens is after the video is captured, a mesh of the building is created using ContextCapture technology. That mesh is then aligned with a BIM model of the building, and it is all finished up by calculating positions and orientations of each frame to augment them with the BIM model.
It was said that Stephane Cote, Research Director at Bentley Systems, commented “in the future a drone could frequently be flying around a construction site, taking photos, and uploading those to a server on the cloud, which would generate a mesh, align it with the BIM model, and augment the photos with the model.” As well as this project, he said this kind of tech would be perfect for large infrastructure projects.
For more on the latest developments in industry-based AR, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.