Related Links: Intel's Smart Bowl Announcement The Magnetyze System Juicebar SunBar As construction users increasingly take up mobile devices, battery drain is becoming a drag. Fortunately, innovators are on it. Here are a few neat items that impress ENR as being particularly promising or useful right now, including one from Intel unveiled at the Consumer Electronic Show in January.Click to begin the slide show.
In 2008, I tested out an augmented reality mobile app called Nearest Tube that allowed me to use my smartphone camera to navigate my way to the nearest London Underground entrance without having to unfold a giant paper map and confirm my status as a tourist. At the time, this seemed nothing short of magical. Five years later, thanks to Google Glass and many other solutions, augmented reality (AR) is finally getting the hype it deserves.At its simplest, augmented reality is the convergence of data, cameras, mobile devices, and live end users, creating a multi-dimensional, real-time, interactive virtual environment that
Related Links: EarthCam ePlanIt OxBlue Elevated Lens Photography photoSentinal Radiusvision OnsiteView iBEAM Construction Cameras AGC discussion on JobCams 26 Gigapixel image of Paris Jobsite cameras take scheduled photos from static positions and stream them to private users or public websites, stringing together the images as movies of projects going up or to archive for later use. While the cameras are a hit with developers and marketers of high-end residential buildings and flagship projects, they are becoming a general construction staple, written into specs from the start, say users and vendors.Sources also say the range of job-cam uses and paybacks is
Mobility and collaboration tools went from nice-to-have to a must-have technology in 2013, as more owners expected contractors to deploy the smartest use of produtivity tools on jobs and jobsites.This year, more companies — especially contractors and general contractors — opened their wallets to investments in mobility and collaboration tools that help them communicate more quickly on a project, and share documents across far-flung project teams.Research and surveys of contractors and subcontractors highlighted the shift. For example, McGraw Hill Construction found that mobility tools such as tablets and cloud services are yielding investment benefits for contractors and specialty contractors. But
Photo by Tom Sawyer I-Search has an unambiguous interface. If you know your engineering, it is easy to use. Related Links: AISC Offers Win, Place or Show Cash for App Design Contest I-Search American Institute of Steel Construction steel tools Structural engineers often are asked to judge the adequacy of a beam or column under present loads or potential loads of a contemplated modification. This typically requires field measurements and a trip to the office to check references. Now, there is an Android app for making quick calls on the spot.Kip Ping, president of Pinnacle Engineering, Cincinnati, Ohio, developed the
Related Links: University at Buffalo's Bridge Engineering Program National Center for Pavement Preservation Two U.S. engineering schools have opened research centers to help bring the nation's infrastructure up to technological speed, but also to train a rising cadre of engineers."Innovation" and "professional development" are bywords at the new $3.7-million Institute for Bridge Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo."There's not a particularly fat pipeline of bridge engineers," says Andrew Whittaker, director of structural and environmental engineering.He says the institute aims to attract talent and develop strategies to help bridges resist natural and man-made hazards outside current design
Researchers at the University of Buffalo measure the corrosion level of a steel-cable strand using a non-invasive monitoring technique, aimed to replace structurally invasive manual checking processes for concrete-embedded steel cables on bridges. “Checking post-tension structures for corrosion is a challenging problem,” says Alireza Farhidzadeh, a University of Buffalo PhD candidate in structural engineering. He says projecting the accurate evolution of corrosion to a cable is nearly impossible because of a variables such as the salting of roads during the winter and the rain and snow levels during the year. Structurally invasive corrosion monitoring techniques are required, such as drilling
Related Links: U.K.s BIM Mandate Driving Major Shift in Digital Tools Adoption Advancing 3D Printing Capabilities Excite Construction Leaders 2013: A Year of Better BIM Collaboration on Jobsites ENR's Construction Science Fiction Collection He’s often called Autodesk’s thought-leader, a futurist about global construction trends, a big ideas man, probably unfailingly polite and, as of late, a construction science fiction author. (See ENR's Imagining Construction's Future collection.)Dominic Thasarathar, a directory of strategy at the design and collaboration software provider, would chuckle at the titles, given that the Londoner still thinks of himself as a technology manager from his days with firms
Related Links: Specifications of UK's BIM Level 2 Mandate Bentley: BIM Also Means Information Mobility Contractors See Gains, Gaps With Growth of Mobility Tools Just a few years ago, "BIM" was just an acronym that meant little to most U.K. construction professionals.Now, building information modeling is the subject of increasingly crowded conferences up and down the country. What made the digital system such a hot topic is a U.K. government mandate saying that, by 2016, collaborative 3D BIM be deployed, with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic, on all centrally funded projects of any value.As a
Photo from Autodesk University Holder Construction works with Autodesk Navisworks and other modeling tools to create 3D plans for site layout and logistics planning. This example is one part of a model designed to plan the work layout for an airport project. Slide courtesy of Turner Construction from Autodesk University Example of a metric that the Turner BIM team came up with to track their rate of effectiveness on clash detection with 3D models. Related Links: UK's BIM Mandate Driving Major Shift in Digital Tools Bentley: BIM Also Means Information Mobility Autodesk University 2013 BIM Presentation by Tyler Goss and
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