The Spatial Reality Podcast

We're held back by a "disconnect between what the techies know and what the industry knows," says Andy Evans of the Construction Verification Initiative. And that means there's only one way to build the construction metaverse everyone dreams of.

Show Notes

Today, our guest is Andy Evans of Digital Construction Works. We met at a 3D tech conference back in 2011 and spent most of our time talking about the music piped into the conference hall. Andy is a professional land surveyor all about fast, productive, scanning tools and techniques for the digital documentation of construction sites and survey work. He's worked with it all, from full tripod-based lidar scanning, through mobile mapping systems, and now a full catalog of 3D capture solutions. But his goal is much bigger than that: a utopian construction metaverse.

Notes:

Creators & Guests

Host
Sean Higgins
Writer/copywriter/editor/podcast host. Mostly tech, other things too.

What is The Spatial Reality Podcast?

We host one on one interviews exploring the businesses and individuals that are defining the applications of spatial computing. We aim to show you how spatial computing can change your business and your life—not a decade from now, not in a few years, but today.

What is the term spatial computing mean to you? Does it mean anything? Is it a hype based term? Is it useful? What's your take on it?

Okay. A little bit about who I am. My background, I'm a. Um, I, from years ago, worked with geomatics before it became geomatics. It was like one of those things that we're talking about. So when you talk about spatial computing, to me, I think of location enabled computing for one of a better description.

That's what it means to me. It may be just giving a point with a location. Something that has geometry in my mind is spatial computing.

To talk more specifically about the work you've been doing in the area of spatial computing the construction verification initiative. Can you tell us what that is and what you've been doing as a part of that organization within the,

So with the construction verification initiative, it's all about this, so since say, 2014 longer than that I've always been about rapid survey, rapid capturing of.

The site around me or the environment around me with geospatial elements. And what do you do with that data?

You know,

you You typically, you turn it into a map and push it back to somebody who has a bit of paper or you maybe do some setting out verification or record. There's all sorts of elements of what you can do with survey data.

But around. When I really got into the depth of scanning, laser scanning and looking at how that applied to bi which I really started getting involved with in 2013. Yeah, that's about right. I started to see like the missing link in the BIM environment.

You've got your cde, you've got your models that are shared with all the project stake. There seemed to be a missing piece, or in my head I was like, Oh. And then you go to model and you build this thing and you record it, and then you have an as constructive building or model or whatever it is that you've got there, and then you hand that over and then you're running the asset with all that information and it's all underpinned by location behind it.

And it quickly dawned on me that a lot of the talk about BIM and this collaborative approach was getting stuck at the office stage and not making it out onto. In the way we thought it should, or certainly from a survey and construction point of view, not in the way that I thought it could.

And so it started playing with it and I was working with Topcon at the time, top composition, and we were doing pushing, scanning and trying to work out how that fitted into the, to the BIM environment. And you look at it and saying okay, we can put some data into, now this works, for example, we can do a start to look at clashes between the point cloud and the model, what's next?

And then that's where, so a piece that I've shared on social media is a piece about from a survey point of view scanning for construction.

Are we in the right place? There's a blog piece that are put out there that, that's been around since 2014. And it's obviously around the same time the guys are clear carers 3d, were thinking about this from they had edgewise. What could they do with the inverse of Ed Weis? And that's a bit of a software called Verity Peter, so called Verity, which does construction verification.

So a year later I'm, they're thinking, Wow, this is amazing. This does exactly what we need. And that was in 2015 when the, I think when the beater came out for verity. It was certainly around. . And and then you're looking at it saying, Okay surely the construction market's gonna pick this up and run with it.

It's amazing technology. And here we are now, 2022. Yes, they have the industry has picked it up and run with it. But there's a massive disconnect between what the technology can do and what the people in the field can do and what's actually getting implemented in on site. And that's where the construction verification initiative came about.

We know construction verification is important.

It's important for. Recording what's going on on site. In terms of if you know what's being built, you can prove what's being built and you can measure and confirm it at every stage of the project, then you've got a huge advantage in qa quality assurance. It's that progressive assurance that some of the tier one contractors and the general contractors talk about can it be achieved on a daily basis?

And there's a core people there that know that the technology's out there, There's multiple different ways of doing it. It's not just one product. There's a number of products that do this. And it's, but that there's a disconnect between what the techies know and then what the industry knows.

So you can still go onto a site today and say, Hey, yeah, we can do this. And they'll be like

Yeah,

yeah, whatever. Don't believe it. Prove it. And then, and even then, even when you prove it, they still don't quite believe this. They believe there's some smoke and mirrors. So the whole aim of the Construction verification Initiative is to make it business as.

How does something like the construction verification initiative get off the ground? What sort of things do you do to engender these conversations between these you could say siloed siloed parts of the the technological and professional landscape?

It's a really good question, and I think the, ultimately it's, you need to be out there. You need to meet people face to face. In terms of something like the construction verification initiative that just came around through, it's purely networking. And what's beautiful about the industry that we're in is there's a lot of like-minded individuals that are, that would appear to be prepared to do stuff because they love it.

So what you've got, you need is that, have you ever seen that video with the guy dancing at a the leadership video, the guy dancing in a field at a concert? Have you ever seen that one? There's a commentary. So there's, this guy starts dancing and he's raving away to the music going on there.

And he's totally on his own. And there's this commentary from some guy that's talking about, this is an example of leadership and this is how it works. And and he is and the most important thing here is, look, there's this guy dancing away. He is making a complete fall of himself, but someone else is Do you know what that looks like fun.

I'm gonna join in. Second guy appears they're both dancing together and it's and then this guy's highlighting says, You know what? You need to look at this second guy, because look how the first guy interacts with the second guy. It's not about the leader, it's about the. And the follower is actually the leader that needs the encouragement and the enthusiasm to build out.

And then the follower gets other people involved, and then you get that momentum to get emotion there.

Get that initiative going, get the likeminded ideas in there, make the challenges, but also encourage each other as well. So you see that with construction verification initiative. You see what the guys at Zero are doing, Zero construct, same thing. Get a whole group of enthusiast together and then try and get it into something with momentum and with impact.

And then the other thing that you'll be aware of as well is you take that construction verification initiative. And then you sit there and you think, Okay that's now what's future. And that's construction, metaverse.

What is the construction metaverse what's the purpose of discussing it?

My aim on this, I think there's a number of things to think about. I think we are looking at something that is definitely the future. Now the construction metaverse for me, I guess the way to frame it, from what I know, what I've learned about the Metaverse since starting to really explore it is . That it's just one portal into it There's multiverses or whatever you wanna call it, and maybe metaverse isn't the right word But from a very fundamental point of view, I think my interest is that I wanna be able to walk out down the. And have the right information that I need at the right time from a construction point of view.

So be it. The stuff in the UK they're doing with new, which is the National Underground Asset Register, for example, there's a project there to effectively be the foundation of the National Digital Twin for a geospatial National Geos twin. That's based on utility inform.

The potential is huge. Now I know that's. A very practical implementation . It's not quite connected to the metaverse side of things. And I think there's a lot of discussion about what is and what isn't.

But also I think it, it also chimes with that element of, it doesn't have to be something that is necessarily even relatable to what we see, but from a very practical point of view it's. Change sets. It's about updating data in real time. It's about getting crowdsourced information in there from all senses possible.

There's no end of contractual and legal issues with trying to do that, but it's that kind of utopia of just having everything in three. It's that virtual reality, but not necessarily a digital representation of that reality. Just the bits you need, so you don't need to.

Um,

A virtual representation of what you're looking at.

You need to understand how it's all connected, and that's where the, I think that's the difference. And for me, the metaverse is more about not the technology, it's not about the process, but it's about the interaction for people with. The stuff that we've already built and understood from trying to think about digital twins.

When you talk about the things that we've learned about the digital twin and how they apply in this, What do you mean by that? You can assume that some of the people listening will not be in construction. So just trying to get a sense for the idea of a digital twin, like the idea of the metaverse, like the idea of spatial computing means different things to different people in different industries.

So what does it mean to you and how does that apply to this idea of a utopian metaverse?

So digital twin for those that are listening or viewing that, that don't know or haven't really come across the use of digital twin. My interpretation is that there is a virtual representation of a physical thing in the.

We have real time sensor information feeding back and forth that are informing and helping make decisions on how something's operating or what's happening right at this moment and then the interest for me is that geospatial piece where it could be a building and you could be a facilities manager that's responsible for just ensuring all the light bulbs on are off and one's gone off.

The sensors are telling you one has gone off where it is and what needs to go there to. As in that kind of stuff. So it's all that sort of, for me it's the operations management piece that was missing from the full BIM story that we were talking about earlier. And that's digital twin, but then you don't, there isn't one digital twin.

There's multiple different digital twins of, for all sorts of bits and barbers. And one of them could be a construction digital twin, or whereas that construction digital twin do well, that has sensor information coming in from machines on site feeding information back versus the project. So it then links back to the construction verification piece, but it's that at near real time.

So there's machines on site. We can get telematics information, tell us fuel burn, tell us distance cover, tell us loud load shifted. We can connect to surveyors on site and pull in what points did you measure today? How many did you measure? What you doing right now? You can get that kind of information and you can feed all of that into a construction digital twin that enable.

Better decisions to be made in a more timely fashion. And that's, that is the construction digital swim for me. So it is a ever-changing operational, virtual representation of site and site conditions. Now, how do you implement that? That's what keeps me busy every day.

Given your experience trying to implement this are you optimistic that it's possible?

So you're nodding yes. What's the, I don't wanna ask what the timeline is because who could know that? But many people like to discuss metaverse ideas as if they're imminent. Like the technology's there and it's gonna take us, it's just gonna take us a couple of months to a year to get everything together.

So can we do it today? Yes. At a certain level. What do I mean by that?

Can we connect to, so let's take, for example, a highs project. Can we connect to machines on site and get information that tells 'em what material is moving, what design they're working to, and how much work they've done? What's the as-built, what's the constructed status of the project versus the plan?

Can we do that? Yeah, a hundred percent.

Can we, So do we understand the technology? Yes. Is there technology out there that can do it? Yes. Do we understand the process? Yes. Are the workflows up and running and seamless? No. Can we do it? Yes. So that's gonna take some time to put the process in. But what's gonna block all of it is the and it's that again, it comes back to where we started the conversation of how do you expand and get people engaged in this, get them to believe that it's possible, believe that they need to do it, even encourage them to want to do it.

Because ultimately the construction industry is, it's a slowed industry to change it. It has set workflows. There's. Things that just happen and there's low margin and there's not time to, to implement some of these things that need to be implemented to change. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes people, it takes commitment.

It takes belief that it's gonna work. It takes proof and return investment studies and case studies and evidence and all that sort of stuff. Have we got it all? Yeah. Are we, have we got enough of it? No. That's all coming. So that's where Construction Verification initiative comes in because there's a group of people there that have done it and have evidence and pulling all that evidence together that it does work.

There's people involved with the construction metaverse Discord group that was recently set up, and there's guys in there that have got evidence of projects that they did years ago. The stuff's there. The biggest challenge is it's the people and the, but also the push to do it as well. There's what's the incentive to put this stuff in place because ultimately, You then have that blocker of if we put technology in here, then what did my staff do?

I've always seen construction is having a particularly conflicted relationship with. In certain cases, amplifying it, in other cases, totally rejecting it. Where would you say this technology is on the hype cycle within the world of construction?

It's a challenging one, isn't it?

I think I would say if you look at the way you are on the on the whole crossing the chasm type implementation of this stuff we're on the, we're on the peak. We're just ahead of the tro disillusionment. I would. I'm gonna go back to whenever it was.

We started with the ar for subsurface data visualization project. We started that not in university. And with a month of us starting the project, whoever was doing the marketing for the university had got a cartoon in the daily mail. They'd got an interview in there as well.

And we were getting phone calls all over the place, wanted to know what we were up to. And I recall a call from someone in the military ringing up to find out. It was like, What are you guys up to? And we're like it's like we're a month into the project. We haven't got anything to show you.

And didn't hear anything again from whoever it was. I can't remember who it was. It called me now, I'd be like so that was a prime example of, this is amazing, the university's doing this, check it out, it's gonna be fantastic. So back then you're like This is certainly hyped up. It's good stuff. It's great for the university. It's not realistic. The practicalities of having a massive gps.

Thing in a backpack and a laptop computer in the back of there and some shutter glasses and a hard hat and an IMU on the back of it, and a GPS antenna

or, it's just not even close to practical.

And I would say even now, one of the challenges that I see with a lot of the AR stuff on site is that the practicalities of using it. Far out when the advantages you get from some of it sometimes because it's, yes, you can get, sent me to love for gps, but even back in the early two thousands the stability of the compass and the orientation sensors was far better than the position update on the gps.

So you could even see that if you had the GPS fixed, then your orientation was always, But as soon as you added in that X, Y, Z position, it starts jumping around and it's a real tough nut to crack. Now I'm interested to see how that will improve with visual slam. You look at what Google could be doing with their street view AR view, I dunno if you've ever tried that, but that's phenomenal.

Really impressive tech. And it just works. That's a really good practical application. If you then so it's a long way of me telling you that what I think is that there's a lot of hype. Yes. But I think we're there, I think we're really on the cusp of some of this stuff being, being ready, usable.

And when you look at, what's really interesting me over the last couple of years is seeing what snap Snapchat's up to with snap maps. And that idea of persistent graffiti, for example, which seems really. But the technical requirements to make persistent graffiti work for all users, just mucking around with Snapchat, with snap maps or whatever they've got access to phenomenal.

And so I think, yes, there's a lot hype. Are. Will tend to over the years, I have learnt to be very realistic about what I talk about. So when I say I'm doing it, I'm doing it. And I'll be very openly honest and tell you if I can't do it. So in terms of the construction verification piece, yes it works.

Should we be adopting it? Yes. How do we get that done? It's contracts, it's people. That's the bit that Needs work

when I ask you topics you might wanna discuss during this podcast, you said one of them, a bonus topic would be that nobody cares about point clouds.

For decision making, the point cloud can be sat there in the background and you don't actually need to see anything at all. So then it links back to this whole

um,

AR piece that my, my interpretation of. where a point cloud sits in . AR is, I don't need to see a point cloud at all.

I just need to know where I am located in relation to that point cloud. So on the one side I couldn't give to who's, what the point cloud looks like, as long as it's geometrically correct and I don't need to see it. I just need to know that my senses are interacting with it. And I think that's what some of the gaming environments and the people that are developing in that space are.

Either missing the trick of not realizing what they can do with the point cloud, or they know it and they wanna do a visual, something that's visually clear, which is really a mesh at this stage, unless you've got a super dense point cloud. So yeah the throwaway for me is that not only is it about not caring about the point cloud because I care deeply about the Point Cloud and I care that it's right because I'm gonna be using it in my head for a reference frame.

But I think what's important is it's one of those classic things that I tell a story that came about through Survey for bim, where if you imagine the shard in London from the perspective of survey for bim, the guys that are involved in that group are really geeky engineering surveyors who care about the setting out details for all of the foundations and everything that the chard sits.

So they care about where it was put, how well it was put in place, what the quality of those survey coordinates were, and it's a massive foundation for the chard. But actually, there's only a small group of people that either care or are even bothered about that because then the guys that the next involved with the shard were building on top of that.

So all the engineers and the structural engineers that cared about that. They just wanted it to be in the right place. They didn't really care on the detail of how it got there or what needed to be understood to make it work. And then in the end, when you look at the shard and who uses it, nobody cares really how it was built or what it was built on to put it in the right place.

And how those foundations are set out, what they care about is how fast the lift are and what the view is over London and there's a massive population that care about that. So there's all. Stuff in the bottom. So that's what I mean, That's what I'm hinting towards. I say nobody cares about the point that, Yeah.

So would you say this is indicative of a larger trend where people working with these technologies , trying to apply them within specific industries, sometimes get wrapped up in. Wrapped up in the technologies themselves rather than the applications of them.

I know I've seen this in the past with the point cloud. I've heard people say what you're saying the point cloud is great, but you can't just hand people a point cloud and call it good. So that's a larger problem with these other technologies as well.

Yeah and I think the flip side of that as well is whenever you deal with somebody that's built something that is from the computing in.

Then I can guarantee the first problem that, that you'll come across is that the coordinates don't work properly because they've been built with either in the wrong axs. So the X and Y are flipped, or those eds flipped. But then also large coordinates because all of our country's coordinate systems, all of the projected coordinate systems are like eight figure grid references.

And as soon as you put that into computer graphics, you then get numerical instability and you get little glitches and it looks all, all. Rubbish. So how that's resolved is by just working with local grid, which then there's always a massive translation issue from going from what the computer graphics guys have gone and said, Oh, it worked brilliantly.

And it's Yeah, but you weren't using real world coordinates and now we're using real world coordinates. You've got a real problem here. And it needs to be resolved. Certainly with, when I was working with the guys, the dev team in Topcon for Magna collage, for example, and Scam Master before.

There was always this thing where you got That's great. You've done some really good computer graphic stuff, but these guys work in real coordinates. We need to work in real coordinates. How can we fix that? Oh we need some more floating points. It needs to be a double, and then, but it manifests into something that then looks a bit shoddy when you try and view it in 3d. So that's the flip side of that was one example, but. But also then that's also an example that I've just given you of getting really in the weeds, talking about numerical instability in computations.

Most people don't care about that or even realize that it's an issue.

As we're approaching the end of this, it seems like we've cycled back. Toward an argument. An argument for something like the Construction verification Initiative, right? By getting people together, discussing these sorts of problems, which I imagine this would happen in any industry, you try to apply these technologies and you run into translation issues. Communication issues, data issues that you might not have otherwise known about cuz people were happy working away in their own little areas.

But this technology seems to have a way of bringing necessitating that we bring everybody together to discuss how data can move amongst them in a way that maybe nothing has before.

Yeah. And I think that move things the key word I'm picking up from that stone there is move because.

Everything happens somewhere. And then that's, and that's what's bringing it together. It's that location piece. Everyone cares about where they are and what they're doing and what they know about their immediate vicinity and where they're going. And that's all location, That's all spatial. Perfect.

Thank you. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

Yeah. Cool.