The construction industry has been searching for years for ways to get out of the two-dimensional world of paper construction drawings to make visualization and collaboration easy and beneficial to all parties. Unless you constantly work with 2D drawings, it’s extremely difficult for someone to determine what the final product will look like, which leads to tons of last second changes and a mad dash to finish on time. While Revit’s three and four-dimensional drawings are a step in the right direction, Trimble and Microsoft have an idea to get those models out of the computer and onto the job site.
Trimble, the company behind SketchUp and several other construction technologies, has recently partnered with Microsoft to bring the HoloLens, which is a holographic Windows 10 platform, to the construction industry. We’ve already deemed Microsoft’s updates to their new operating system, Windows 10, as a game changer in the tablet world, and now it’s providing yet another exciting development that the industry should get behind.
The Microsoft HoloLens is a holographic headset that looks like a sleeker version of the headsets you would have seen at an arcade in the late 1990s. With it, Trimble is determined to connect it to their cloud platform (Trimble Connect), 3D modeling software SketchUp, and their camera system that allows 360-degree pictures for measurements and visual documentation (Trimble V10 Imaging Rover). The Image Rover uses 12 calibrated cameras to create 3D models from pictures.
The HoloLens will allow architects to manipulate holographic images in 3D in real time with just the click of a mouse or a specific movement of their own fingers. On the job site, the user will be able to project images onto the wall, take pictures and communicate visually with people outside of the job site. Imagine being able to project the layout of a wall into the actual area on your job site that you’ll be building that wall. Not only will that prevent a lot of costly rework, it will make it amazingly quick and easy to layout the wall and build it exactly to specifications, without going back and forth between your set of plans, your spec book, and the build area.
While Trimble’s software solutions integrated with HoloLens are still under development, the video below shows Trimble’s ultimate vision for this product. The results are pretty exciting.
Trimble and Microsoft HoloLens | Trimble
Tablets are the latest hot ticket item in the construction industry, everyone either wants to or is using them, and we think that’s great. The iPad and Android tablets have basically controlled the tablet market since its creation, and for good reason: Windows has failed to make their tablets friendly to app developers. While Windows tablets are typically more powerful (see Microsoft Surface Pro 3) than its competitors and can run full versions of all the programs you use on your desktop and laptop (like Microsoft Office and, amazingly, Adobe Photoshop, the Windows app store is noticeably bare and keeps a lot of potential users away.