Reason 2: Low barrier to entry
Recently, Matterport announced scanning support for IOS based mobile devices. Most construction contractors that have teams that work on site supply those teams with IOS based mobile devices. If your on-site team or even your project management team has access to these devices, they can begin scanning projects immediately. Also, Matterport offers a free trial account for processing and storing your digital spaces.
Large engineers, building owners, general contractors and sub-contractors that work on multi-million dollar construction projects have been utilizing laser scanning technologies for years to increase the speed and accuracy of their design, fabrication and installation teams. Due to the sizes of these companies and the projects they work on, these guys were able to invest in the expensive laser scanning hardware, necessary personnel, necessary training and the expensive processing software necessary to make this workflow effective. Before the Leica BLK360 and the Trimble x7 hit the market, the price for laser scanners ranged from $75,000-$150,000. Autodesk Recap, the most commonly used point cloud processing software is $325/year. Needless to say, the small guys with total revenues of less than a million dollars a year would not spend over a tenth of there total revenue on highly technical hardware, software and training to implement a workflow that may or may not save them money and time when working design build jobs. Due to the low cost of the supported 360 cameras and the Leica BLK 360 laser scanner, outsourcing reality capture to companies that leverage Matterport technologies (such as PGP Design Group) and/or developing a reality capture workflow internally is very cost effective no matter the size of your company.
Comments