Starting Off:
Last Friday, the ConTechTrio aired episode 57 of the podcast in which James Benham (@JamesmBenham), Josh Bone (@BIM2theBone) and special guest host Sasha Reed (@Alohasasha) discussed the latest construction tech news. Headliners last week included Flashforge 3D Printers, McKinsey’s construction productivity report, real-time clash detection demos with BuildingSP, VIATechnik’s quality control on construction sites and much more! Special guest Cody Nowak, Director of Research and Development at Martin Brothers, also joined to discuss disrupting construction with holograms.
Listen to “ConTechTrio 57 Disrupting Construction with Holograms w/ Cody Nowak @DisruptAEC & The @ff3dprinters Dreamer” on Spreaker.
Tech You Should Try:
Flashforge Dreamer 3D Printer – Pricing in at $1,099 dollars the Flashforge Dreamer 3D printer is made for durability. It includes dual extruders (prints in two colors,) built-in Wi-Fi, built-in 4G memory support, self developed software, and much more!
Weekly ConTechTrio Twitter Poll:
Last Week’s Poll: How many phones have you replaced due to breaking them on the job site last year? The poll resulted in 76% of participants saying “None,” 10% have broken “1-2” phones on the job site, 7% have broken “3-4” and 7% have broken “More than 4” phones on site.
This Week’s Poll: “Does your company use augmented reality to visualize projects before or during construction?” Visit the ConTechTrio Twitter page and simply answer “Yes” or “No.”
FYI:
Make sure you join the ConTechTrio Live at CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2017 for live podcasts from AEM’s official podcast pavillion! Coming to you March 9th,10th & 11th in Las Vegas, Nevada. For more information, visit jbknowledge.com/vegas.
Save time, money and headaches with Plans4Less. You can order full and half size plans, choose black and white or color, and receive low fixed rate pricing. Call 1-855-Plans-4-Less today, or visit their site today, and mention the ConTechTrio to receive 10 free plans!
Construction Tech News:
Industry Education, Insights & Trends
Amazon Mystery Solved: A Typo Took Down a Big Chunk of The Internet
Due to human error, half of the internet went down in a massive simple storage service (S3) failure at Amazon web services. The four-hour outage caused 150,000 websites to close temporarily.
Improved Productivity Required New Management Mindset
McKinsey & Company has provided a new industry research report titled “How Engineering and Construction Firms Can Beat the Low-Productivity Trap.” This study shows that updating construction management processes is a must when it comes to boosting productivity and profits. “Management needs to understand the value of people, processes and technology and look at how you integrate them together.” – Sasha Reed
Real Time Clash Detection Demo in Autodesk Revit with BuildingSP
Click here to watch this amazing demo of real time clash detection with ClashMEP from BuildingSP. This is the future of clash, allowing you to change your workflows as you are modeling. “Real time clash resolution is the future, and will save people lots of time.” – Cody Nowak
Laser Scanning vs. Conventional Surveying
Autodesk Community discusses the cost to capture in laser scanning verses conventional surveying during post-construction. In a recent case, the total cost for conventional surveying was more than $42,000 dollars and the total cost using a laser scanner was only around $11,000 dollars. If people doubt you that laser scanning can save you money, then read this article!
Boeing Employee Exposses Personal Data of 36K Co-Workers
A Boeing employee sent an excel document to his wife (a non-Boeing employee) that had personal data from 36,000 co-workers including date of birth, social security numbers and addresses. After a forensic examination of both computers, all copies made of the spreadsheet have now been deleted according to Boeing. This should serve as a learning experience that huge amounts of data can be compromised by one email. James Benham insists in the podcast to stop using Excel due to its lack of security!
Reinventing Construction through a Productivity Revolution
McKinsey & Company discusses the global construction sector in this article and shows with the graphic below how the lagging construction productivity costs the global economy $1.63 trillion dollars a year. So how do we shape the future of construction? BIM expert and ConTechTrio co-host, Josh Bone, is 100 percent certain the future of construction is in lean offsite construction which includes prefab, modular, precast, panelized, component and volumetric.
Edge Computing Will Blow Away The Cloud
CIO Magazine explains how everything in the construction industry is about pendulums. This article touches on the prediction of how Internet of things (IOT) devices, drones and autonomous vehicles could slowly evaporate the computation that is currently done in the cloud.
Prefabrication & Design
What Happens When Algorithms Design a Concert Hall?
The stunning “Elbphilharmonie,” was generatively designed with 10,000 unique acoustic panels, 2,150 seats and 1,000 hand-blown glass light bulbs. The concert hall was designed by Herzog and De Meuron with the help of algorithms and is priced at $843 million dollars.
Emerging Technology
Robots and Drones: Coming Soon to a Construction Site Near You
This week at CONEXPO-CON/AGG, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) is going to show new technology that is out there which includes, autonomous machines, next generation drones, heavy data, and much more! “Robots are not going to take your jobs but are going to be apart of your job and how you do work.” – Josh Bone
Quality Control on Construction Sites
VIATechnik, a Chicago based virtual design and construction services firm, developed an augmented reality application called Punch-AR. Punch-AR uses Microsoft HoloLens to improve the quality of construction job sites by recording broken items/construction defects by simply saying “picture” or using the pinch gesture in HoloLens. Watch the video here.
A Tiny Chip Can Revolutionize Smartphone and IOT Security
Engineers from SK Telecom in South Korea have developed a five millimeter tiny chip that is capable of generating mathematically provable random numbers. This tiny chip is expected to be in sample production in March, could provide a sense of security for Internet of Things (IOT) devices and will only cost a few dollars once in commercial production.
[INTERVIEW] Cody Nowak, Director of Research and Development at Martin Brothers, Discusses Disrupting Construction with Holograms
In the second half of the podcast, Cody Nowak, Director of Research and Development at Martin Brothers joined the ConTechTrio to discuss disrupting construction with holograms. Cody was born and raised on Whidbey Island in Washington State. He went to college in Seattle with a degree in industrial design. Due to the poor economy in Seattle for architecture, Cody moved to Los Angeles in 2007 to pursue BIM at Martin Brothers.
Martin Brothers quickly gave Cody full control to implement augmented and virtual reality throughout the BIM department. Cody is a BIM guru and his innovation and vision makes him a thought leader in the AEC industry.
Cody discusses the inception of the “No Plans, No Problem” video where Martin Brothers successfully framed a bathroom pod by using HoloLens. The video shows how a 3D BIM model can turn directly into a 3D layout and save users a lot of time. Cody and the ConTechTrio wrapped up the interview by discussing the PS 1000 scanner, defining HoloLens and its advancements, BIM democratization, as well as, the changes in how we visualize projects in the future.
Tune into the ConTechTrio podcast next week for Episode 58, featuring Jake Olsen, Vice President of Global Engineering at DeWALT, discussing new BIM software for mechanicals. Until then, you can catch up on past episodes of our construction technology podcast and even check out some bonus episodes via the links below!
Listen: Spreaker, SoundCloud , YouTube, iTunes
Follow On Twitter:
JBKnowledge: @JBKnowledge
ConTechTrio: @ConTechTrio
James Benham: @JamesMBenham
Josh Bone: @BIM2theBone
Sasha Reed: @AlohaSasha
