Photo Courtesy of Conti Construction Corp. Contractors survey the heating, electricity and hot water of a Superstorm Sandy-ravaged home by using iPad minis and e-Builder, a construction program management system. Screenshot Courtesy of eBuilder Inc. Related Links: e-Builder To define the extent of Superstorm Sandy's damage to residential properties, New York City and the Federal Emergency Management Administration last fall issued a request for proposals for a rapid repair program. One of the winning contractors now credits its use of a mobile construction program management app and a fleet of iPad minis for its ability to meet the city's exacting
The attendees this year's COFES (Congress Of the Future of Engineering Software) in Scottsdale, Ariz. last weekend witnessed examples of across-the-board engineering brilliance that will transform the garment industry, and which have implications for many industries, including construction.One presenter demonstrated a smartphone application that captures a complete set of body measurements by taking two pictures of a person fully clothed, and turning those pictures into a 3D model. Another presenter demonstrated a new weaving method called DPOL (Direct Pattern on Loom) which only weaves the cloth needed for a pattern, thus eliminating the 30% loss generated by weaving bolts of
Related Links: Top Apps Recommended by FutureTech Readers and ENR Editors AEC App Showcase by Case/SOM Nine Noteworthy Apps for Construction Something big is happening in construction technology. It goes beyond the recent rampant growth of smart devices on jobsites and the explosive development of apps around the globe. It even goes beyond the growth of cloud computing, helping to manage large project files with faster networks that connect far-flung work crews.As big as these trends are, an even bigger shift is happening: Collaboration and web services are becoming the norm on more and more projects and transforming how the
By Tom Sawyer IBM's Bartlett called for urgent action to reduce building energy waste By Tom Sawyer Rudolf and Sletten's Chris Jadwin speaks with EarthCam representatives. Related Links: The Rise of the Super Subs Collaboration Apps Top ENR Survey Results Construction practitioners are eager to embrace technology to improve the industry, but they are hungry for information that can help them see how.More than 300 construction professionals turned out for ENR's FutureTech Conference, held on March 14 in San Francisco, looking for just that kind of information. It was the fourth ENR-sponsored event in the past two years on the
Courtesy of New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. Superstorm Sandy's floodwaters submerged the basement and subsequently inundated nine to 12 inches of the first floor of the Health and Hospital Corp.'s Coney Island hospital. Health-care owners, contractors and other stakeholders are grappling with a host of issues in Superstorm Sandy's wake. As the storm's waters filled hospital basements and, in many cases, reached first floors, one question that has arisen is where to relocate the information-technology and other critical systems and equipment that typically reside there. While the 2001 terrorist attacks caused many hospitals to install wide-area networks and
Related Links: Aconex Touts Integration With New Field App U.S. ERP Vendor Viewpoint Reels In U.K. Collaboration Service 4Project For every project team that uses 3D building information models and punch-list apps to improve productivity on a jobsite, the handoff of the building to its owners and building managers is still, for many, a paper-driven affair.Leigh Jasper, the CEO of project collaboration-software company Aconex, is on a mission to change that handoff process to digital documentation with the firm's release of its latest operations-and-management (O&M) suite of tools.Called Smart Manuals, the offering aims to align construction project information through O&M
Related Links: QR Codes Unlocking Secrets of NYC Building Permits NYC Dept. of Buildings Website New York City's Dept. of Buildings has become a hub for apps that help users access building information with their smart devices.The latest release from the DOB's Digital Hub division is a free app that lets users look up information on nearly 1 million properties throughout the city's five boroughs.Available for Apple and Android devices, the app features a basic menu of search functions. After a user types in a building's address and borough, the app pulls up information such as the lot number, building
I started my career in a different era, developing software applications for DOS, Mac computers and Unix systems.Software development was complex in those days. For example, we had to establish special code to render screens on three different platforms. Things became easier with the introduction of HTML and browsers, but the functionality was limited. Today, while we still have some complexities with multiple browsers and devices, developing software is much easier and faster and delivered at higher quality. The results are a huge proliferation of commercial and proprietary applications. Further, there are now hundreds of thousands of mobile applications that
Photo Courtesy of University of Alberta Roving Pilot Trailing up to 200 meters behind a tunnel-boring machine as it moves through the earth, a surveying robotic total station computes the TBM's geospatial position to within 3-mm accuracy in real time. Related Links: New Alignment System for Tunneling Machines To Be Tested The Inventor's Upcoming Fiatech Presentation After more than six months of full-scale field testing on the construction of a 1,000-meter sewage tunnel, a geomatics-based survey guidance system for tunnel-boring machines shows promise for reducing interruptions in surveying while delivering real-time as-builts of the tunnel's interior."We can easily save 10%
Photo courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology Safety checks Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student Ebrahim Karan prepares to pilot an unmanned aerial vehicle (circled in red) to check a university jobsite. Photo courtesy of Georgia Institute of Technology A GIT graduate student monitors the images and video that the UAV's camera is capturing and transmitting back to the iPad from the UAV's jobsite inspection. Related Links: FAA's Website for Updates on Unmanned Aircraft Systems FAA Website For Testing Site RFP Information FAA's Feb. 13, 3013 Call for Proposals on Six U.S. Test Centers Electronic Frontier Foundation Website on Drone