It's not enough to practice virtual design and construction anymore. Today's contractors must develop an effective data strategy beyond individual projects.

In a best-case scenario, successful and often incremental research gradually evolves into products intended to solve  construction problems.

Two new software products for rapidly converting collections of photos into 3D models and rapidly creating realistic environments for those models—one called ContextCapture, the other called LumenRT—demonstrate technical sophistication, data management techniques, rendering speed and ease of use that has reviewers taking notice but asking for more validation, too.