360 DIGITAL ASSET CAPTURE FOLLOW UP SESSION 1 MEETING 03-07-2025
GEORGE STEVENSON …the experienced people who may no longer want to work onsite can still contribute and train up younger people, which I thought was brilliant timing for this because that’s exactly what I think that we can do with the 360s. We’ve already been talking with the Supply Chain Sustainability School which is the organisation that is funded by CITB and it provides free training for supply chain members that are below 250 employees, which is the majority of people that are involved in construction.
So, if we can curate a course around how 360s can help with that they’ll deliver it for free to the supply chains. And they are funded by all of the big construction companies and a lot of the big players. So, that’s something that if we hook that in with what this lady Christy McDonald I think her name is, was saying this morning then we’ve got some big opportunities.
So, the purpose of this, this is a follow-on from Barry’s masterclass last Friday. What we want to do is then look at having understood what taking 360s, how best to achieve that to get the best and most cost effective 360s. What we want to do is then say how can we apply them? So, what’s the point? Let’s figure out how best to deliver some value from that. So, the purpose of this meeting is for us to do a bit of brainstorming, based on your own experiences how could this be applied?
Maybe identify some projects that you’re aware of that we might be able to apply it on, so that we can then not just have it as a theory or a nice to have, but actually apply it for business benefits. As Barry says, how do you phrase it, Barry? Talking about the pain or the problem.
BARRY BASSNETT In the land of the headache, the man with the aspirin is king.
GEORGE STEVENSON Exactly, I think that’s what we want to try and achieve. What I was going to do, one of the big problems that I come across is that most people are totally confused about what the difference is between laser scanning, Lidar, photogrammetry, 360s, and how those then fit in with things. So, for example, a lot of the reason, 360s are being taken all of the time now by construction companies largely to manage quality, so that auditing the quality of the work that’s being carried out so they can evidence that fire stopping, for example, has been put in properly.
So that’s one of the reasons, the other big reason is so they can use it for cost management. Because 5D BIM, for example, I think seems to have dropped away. 5D BIM is where the BIM model is used to do cost management. And I think other than in the early stages people are using the 360s for that and that seems to be the way that we’re going. So, what we’re proposing is that the 360 is 3D, clearly it’s 3D, and it’s a mechanism of enabling people to navigate complex information. But what we want to try and do in today’s session, and the one tomorrow, is to really get our heads together to say what are the headaches and what is the aspirin that we can bring to that.
So, I’m going to show some examples of the way that we’re doing in on projects to get your creative juices working. Most of you have seen bits of this before, but I’m not going to apologise for that because I think that we need to make sure that everybody is on the same page. This is one of the ways that we’re thinking of things now, 360 O&M. So O&Ms are notoriously challenging to be able to both check and also to find things. So, what we’re doing is we’re bringing together the fact that there’s a range of different files and data sets, often very good information, but it’s not connected. So the challenge is how do you check and do something with that.
What we’re doing is using this to bring together the various different sets of information so that it’s all machine-readable and therefore we can then integrate information that’s coming from various different information sets and applications and make them all connectable. And the connectability back to the 360s becomes really quite important. And the approach that we’re taking anyway, this is normal practice, is that you’ve got a coordinated set of information that’s come from BIM models for anything that’s been put in the BIM models. Well, I say for anything, but what we’re now looking to do is to also capture things like walls.
We’ve been developing methods of capturing walls, but that isn’t normally in COBie, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. Also, we’re recognising the fact that there’s quite a lot of stuff that never goes in a BIM model, so what we’re doing is capturing that from say technical submittals. But the most important thing is that we can also capture it from 360 photos. So, we’ve got a range of different ways of building up what should be there on a new build project. And therefor it becomes a lot easier to maintain. So, the big innovation that we’ve managed to achieve is that we’ve got 360 photos that are coming from all sorts of different sources, and that’s brilliant. The thing is that they are not intelligent.
So, by combining them with the asset library then we’ve actually got something that adds intelligence to the 360 photographs. Now, because the asset libraries can also be connected into all of the other information that is being collected from lots of different software applications. Then it means that we can then turn the 360 photos that are probably being created from a range of different tools like simple Ricoh Theta or Insta cameras. These are the £400 cameras that Barry was talking about last week. And then there may also be ones that professional surveyors have used where the £30,000 or £40,000 Lidar cameras, like the Leica. And also the NavVis cameras which are the ones that go on your shoulders.
But we’re not bothered where those 360s are coming from, that’s the important thing. They can come from anywhere, the most cost effective way of doing it. And the other thing is that there’s a whole vast range of different applications now that construction companies are using. I heard the other day that Viewpoint have now launched one as well, so that’s another lozenge that needs to go on there. But the point about this is that all of those are capturing 360 photos already. On a lot of new projects they are already being collected in one of those 10 or so different platforms. So, as long as we can get he 360s from those, which we can, then it means that we’ve got a mechanism to say what was there before the ceiling was closed out.
And by doing that it means that we can then start to look at some of the things that we’ve been discussing. So, this is just my suggestion as to some of the ways in which we can apply those. The FM teams are using 360s already for doing asset capture, so that’s a no brainer. And the process is now very well established and it’s proven to be 6 to 8 times faster than sending people to the sites. We’ve also got the means to do validation, so in other words checking what has actually been provided. Or the records maybe for an existing portfolio of buildings, they say that there’s 20,000 assets that need maintaining and actually when the FM starts working on them there’s 40,000. So that validation is important.
The assessment side of things is one that we’re quite excited about at the moment. We’ve got a big firm of surveyors who’ve now decided that they’re going to apply it to 800 buildings. This is for doing stock condition surveys and condition surveys, so that’s an interesting area. Safety, we’ve also been exploring that. These are just some prompts that we can discuss later if you agree with them. And then to be able to navigate around an O&M, or indeed to enhance a fire risk assessment, rather than the fire risk assessment simply being a PDF report with information about things that they’ve found with photographs in the, by adding the 360 on it just brings it to life because people can see where that thing is. And obviously how that fits into the Golden Thread.
I’m going to pause there for a moment. I’ve got some practical examples of what that really means, but I wanted to pause and see if anybody has got any comments or observations on that.
PIERRE VENTER My one concern in a number of ways is about standardisation. And the principle here is almost on a very, very rigid system. The main reason is that if people are coming from multiple different backgrounds, multiple different locations in the world etc on global projects. The one problem that I’ve encountered elsewhere was if you weren’t absolutely stringent about the standards is that you get wobbles. And then you end up spending hours tidying up trying to find and identify stuff.
So, the one standard, for instance, in all of this, and George you’re probably already doing this, given the fact that we have a GIS location, is that there are certain features of equipment, certain features of the work has been delivered and how it should be structured. I’m not saying what the form looks like, but basically the data that’s going to go in. The more standard that is, it will lead to far better engagement, in my opinion.
GEORGE STEVENSON I absolutely agree and we’re on exactly the same page, Pierre. I think what we’re doing, we’ve already got quite a lot of standardisation in the asset library that we’ve already got. And we’ve got about 3,500 asset types in there that are already classified against Uniclass, IFM and NRM. So, that’s already the case.
PAUL OAKLEY Just following on from what Pierre was saying, the metadata associated with the 360s. We talked about things like the locations and things like this, but having a standard set of metadata that means that you can geospatially locate all of those 360s, the naming, that they belong to a particular building. We know a lot of the systems out there just use a PDF and then pin a generic location on there.
But somehow sorting naming out so we recognise a spatial, the level, sometimes it deals with the X Y but it doesn’t deal with the Z, so you don’t know what floor things are on and stuff like this. So I think looking at what metadata is available on the 360s and then standardising how these things should be done would be crucial for dealing with the mass of stuff as it’s generated.
GEORGE STEVENSON The other thing is that there’s works going on at the moment, Pierre, with RICS? 16 mins 15 secs, CIBSE and the like to come up with a standard data set that should all be hanging together. I’ve been told about it, we’ve not yet seen what that is, but that’s where we’re going. And obviously there’s things like, the classification will depend on the purpose.
PIERRE VENTER Just to come in here, one of the observations is obviously O&Ms. An example is in the UAE, one of the buildings in Mall of Emirates had a leakage problem with the ski ramp. And all of the O&Ms and the digital data and everything was in a room underneath the ski ramp. And basically it was papier-mâché simply because at the time that that was done in the original documents, a massive, massive knock on. I do think, and these are some of the features that need to come in, if I look at ACC, BIM 360 and the issue tool is that like Paul has just said, the containers where all of these things are relevant, spatial containers, room spaces, the building where it’s located etc, is absolutely stringent because when you select an issue in 260 you can immediately send it off to Barry or yourself.
And it immediately connects you to the data, there is no latency. In fact, the biggest latency I’ve ever had was 16 seconds to actually get to where the problem was or the issue was being raised. And that’s the kind of target of a benchmark that would be absolutely critical because then you can go back and say it takes you 16 seconds, this is the cost. If you didn’t do that, that’s the cost, manpower, time etc.
BARRY BASSNETT I think these points that you’re raising are absolutely critical to the whole 360 ethos. What I call findability, 25% of any knowledge management company’s time is spent looking for information. So, the issue with 360 imagery is actually taking the photographs is the easiest part. The more interesting part for me in some ways is this getting findability, how do we locate these 360s in space? Now, we can do it externally very easily, but internally it’s a bit of a pain. And if I’m taking a thousand photographs like I did at a data centre a couple of weeks ago, where are all of these photographs taken?
So what I’ve done is I’ve always developed a naming structure, alongside the client, that is aligned either if they’ve got space allocations to do that, because it’s the naming of the 360s so that you can find them. There are three things in any image that you need to know about. One is where was it taken in the building, which part of the building room, which wall is it facing. The other thing is when was it taken, because one of the things that this is used for is to look at monitor at changes. Whether that’s remedial work before and after, or whether it’s deterioration and dilapidation over 10 years, whatever it might be.
But the other one, and it’s probably the most important, is what was it a photograph of. And this is where the whole meta-tagging structure comes in and this is actually where it fits in really well with what George and AP do. And there are other flavours out there, of course, who do similar sort of things. But the three things that we need to look at with photography is where was it taken, when was it taken and what is it a photograph of. So what you’re saying, Pierre, and what you were saying Paul, is absolutely right. It’s about having a straightforward taxonomy tagging structure that can be applied to the image itself, as well as to any external data requirement, like George’s system does.
That’s one of the things, I’ve been working over the last 15-20 years doing this and I’ve come up with there’s every industry has its own way of doing things. The interesting thing is the oil and gas and nuclear industry, where I’ve been spending most of my time, have solved a lot of these problems that the construction industry is dealing with. So sometimes we don’t need to look internally at solutions, it’s already been solved by the nuclear industry and by oil and gas. Where you’ve got, so we’ve got CAD related to databases. So, if we want to change something we can just have one instance and change it.
So there’s an awful lot of things that hopefully we can bring to the party that have been done and solved in other areas that the AEC sector is now coming to grips with. But looking at those brown applications that George has got on that slide 360 capture, I can think of another 20 applications. I’ve just got off a phone call where we’re looking at 360 imagery to help manage disability access to buildings. It’s just a brilliant way that allows the building owner and the person who’s disabled to use the same common data set. And break down a silo, because that’s one of the things…we’re looking at it from a BIM point of view and for new build. But also the vast majority is old stock, and that’s really why the 360 thing bridges the gap between Revity, Archicad, whatever we’re using facilities management and the actual user of the building. And that’s the reason I’m passionate about 360.
PIERRE VENTER The Maddison Square Gardens Las Vegas fear. One of the issues, and Barry this comes to we’ve got this pile of data, we’ve got graphics, we’ve got one of the things was their health & safety requirements were being managed with facial biometric recognition. In other words, it’s just another form of data. But what it was a person who isn’t supposed to be in the welding area, immediately the data identified it and said to Barry, John is in the welding area, please sort it out.
And essentially we’ve got added value in many, many different areas and that’s for me quite important to be able to identify the potential for that. And then let it get taken away and run like the NavVis system. Suddenly someone can actually provide certain things and exactly this. The standardisation, the opportunities that there are and they could be quantified and made a business case of it. Because, as you know, we’ve got a healthy H&S system in the UK which is the tail wagging the dog in many different cases.
NIKKI BARROW I was just going to mention basically what Barry said really. It’s absolutely vitally important with the new residential PEEPs regulations dropping at some point very soon, which should have been laid before parliament last month. This is an absolutely amazing way of being able to see what is appropriate for people, wheelchair users, for example, are the doors wide enough? Are there assets in the way of people being able to manoeuvre around the building? Which is fantastic, but also from a training opportunity, there are plenty of housing officers that really still don’t understand the Building Safety Act.
And they don’t understand the ramifications of having things in certain places etc etc. So, being able to show people a visual and walk people around the building and say can you spot what’s wrong here? Can you see what’s right here? Can you see how we can improve here? It gives us a massive training opportunity to be able to do that. So, I’m glad that you mentioned about what you saw in the news this morning, George, that was really good.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, the interesting thing Nikki is that I was also talking to somebody that ran the, we’ve done a project recently with Westminster Council. And the project manager that was running that, it was a third-party, he said that when he saw what we’re now doing with this, we didn’t use that much 360 on that particular one, but we’re now revisiting that. And he said this would be an amazing training tool for social value. In other words, being able to engage residents or the local young people, to be able to make that a training exercise.
And he was suggesting that we should be looking at talking, at the moment we’re talking to the building safety people and the asset management people within the councils. But he was saying that we should really also be talking to, would it be resident engagement do you think?
NIKKI BARROW Yeah, absolutely, resident engagement, because you’re heightening that awareness of what to look out for. Because ultimately the residents don’t know and 90% of the time when you get a complaint or any sort of enquiry from a resident, actually it doesn’t fall within the remit of building safety anyway because it will go off to a housing manager. It will be there’s rubbish left in this particular place, or I’m aware that someone’s been smoking constantly and setting off the fire alarm etc., and actually they are educational pieces. But actually if you can walk people around the building and say yes, no, this is not appropriate in this area and this is why.
But you can also look for things to look out for in the form of structural. Everyone focuses so much on building safety with regards to fire safety, and they don’t really still incorporate enough of that structural safety element of it. So, it’s so important to be able to engage with the residents. And it’s all about making them feel safe. How can you make them feel safe without them having a visual of their building and what is? Yes, you can walk around with them, but realistically speaking you’re not going to necessarily capture 100% of the audience when you’re walking around with people. Because you’re going to miss people out at work, or you’ll miss people with children etc.
If you can run a series of online events, because there are statistics to say that people are much more inclined to join online events because they can sit in the comfort of their own home, it doesn’t matter if the children are in the front room playing. Or they can take their phone around with them whilst they’re cooking dinner or whatever it is, and actually then show them their building from the comfort of their sofa, they’re more inclined to do that.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’ve got a couple of examples of things that we’re working through. As Active Plan, we’ve been working with Tower Hamlets for the last couple of years, Ridge and partners are doing the surveys, the scanning and they’re coming into Active Plan. This is the sort of methodology, most of you will have seen this before, this is a NavVis camera. So this is the sort of Lidar that’s also capturing the 360s at the same time. And what that means is that we’re able to create the spaces that then the 360s go into.
So, I’m just showing this as an example because here we’ve got the 360s. And then on the right hand side, it’s going back into a standardised library that’s all pre-classified to Uniclass. And then when you then can see something in the 360, you can simply tag it and that writes it to the database. So that becomes an auditable set of information and can feed into the safety case and the like. Here’s another quick example of that that’s also showing where the compartment walls are.
This is another one from Tower Hamlets. In this particular case you can see where the safety critical assets are, the lifts and also the bin stores where the big threats are. And the team can then go and say we can see a lift there, and that can be then tagged as a result of that. So, this is where the standard libraries are really important because it means that they’re all pre-classified. And then if you’re then looking for something you can then just go to a schedule, I think that’s really what Pierre was just saying. Just by pressing that, it remembers where that particular thing is in the 360s. So, that’s navigating to that automatically.
This one is showing how that can be done to check the information that’s in the secure information box. So, this was an example that Paul Womack identified where the secure information box, the Gerda information in here, that looks a solid wall, but actually it’s not a solid wall. So this becomes pretty dangerous for the fire brigade. And this is again just being able to go around identifying what’s in there. So, we’re using the 360s as a way of navigating the asset data and then verifying that, so being able to identify where those assets are. A team of people can do this, that’s the important thing, you can have somebody that’s maybe identifying where the dry risers are. Somebody else who’s an electrical expert can look at the electrical stuff. And this one here is showing how conditioned surveys can be done.
So you can have a template there against that door that you can then, if the information has been captured in an application like Riskbase or Plan Radar then you’re able then to do that condition assessment, but do it remotely, rather than having to go to site. And potentially, if this works the way we’re expecting it to, it’s going to be quite a game changer. And this one here is just showing verification. This is tying back to…this is where information has been captured in OpenSpace, so this is the OpenSpace model which is also showing the 360 photograph, what it was before that ceiling went up. And here it’s allowing you to validate what’s been handed over against a schedule.
So, these are just practical ways, so this is 360 validate rather than 360 capture. We’ve got a few projects that we’re working on at the moment that we can start to introduce people to. This is Watney Market which Barry is starting at the moment for us. And this is a market in Tower Hamlets and that’s an interesting one that I’d like Barry to just explain the process that we’re following there. But if anybody here, any councils, are actually doing this same sort of thing, then there’s a way that we can work together.
BARRY BASSNETT Just to the left of that block of flats you can see that there’s a market. Now, this is a real challenge in terms of mixed use because what you’ve got is a massive car park with lots of storage for the market. Then you’ve got a market with retail space and on top of that you’ve got four or five levels of flats. So in the worst case scenario it’s an awful, whoever thought of putting a block of flats on top of a tinder box of a market, well anyway, that’s something else. The issue here is of course they have to do all of the fire safety evaluations and things that, but we want to expand it so it’s not just going to be used for that.
So, what we are doing here is we’re doing a drone survey to get the external 3D model and the data. We’re getting internal scans because the drawings need to be validated. And then we’re doing 360. And the sort of innovation that we’re applying to this is to use what we call single point targets. So, by mounting targets on the wall and the floor, we can go back later and tie everything in to get the camera positions in three dimensions down to a couple of centimetres. So we can go and compare like with like. And all the photographer has to do is just photograph one of the targets that will be on the wall or a door or on the floor, and there’s a common central connection.
So you can go and mix everything and if you see changes. There’s all sorts of interesting things that we’re doing. It’s a mixture of different types of applications of data capture, but I think the thing that we’re really interested in is how we’re going to apply it to 360 imagery. So we can, I hate the word democratisation, but basically it’s to put simple tools in the hand of someone that doesn’t need that much training. The beauty of 360 is we just saw the NaVvis system, well that’s great, that’s £80,000 worth of kit, but you could do this for £500 and a little bit of training.
So we’re going to be using this as an example and what George thought of is to open the progress of this live project up to everybody so they can see how things progress. So what I’m planning to do is actually use a new system called SORVO which allows you online to look and follow the progress of everything that we’re doing. To look at how we build the models, how we use the 360s, how we use the CAD models, how we do the line work and how we bring all of this together to convert something where there is hardly any information to something where there is more information than you’d possibly want to know.
But also to apply this because one of the things is once you’ve got a 360 tour, think of it like Google Streetview on steroids or cocaine, you can repurpose that tour for all sorts of different audiences. So it may well be that the estates management and the evaluation want this 360 model so they can look at evaluation of their properties for rateable values and things. It may well be that somebody who’s disabled may want to be visiting that and want to have a look and see where is the bus stop, where’s the tube station, how do they get from A to B. So the idea really is to use a common platform where we can share all of these different levels. Think of it like a CAD model, you’ve got a layer that’s appropriate to HVAC.
OK, well it might be something to do with emergency or personal evacuation plans, or whatever it might be. But to have this in a common format based around a 360 imagery. so the idea of over the next probably six months while we’re doing this is to build this up, and also to provide it as access to anybody, to the community at large who wants to understand 360 and how that can impact all sorts of asset management. Now, asset management could be a zillion different things, but the idea really is to use this as a template.
And for people to, if they want to, get subject matter experts to use this to populate and try and make it into a collaborative tool as well. Obviously we’ve got to deliver something to the client at the end of the day, so that’s one thing, but we will try to make this available to all of the community to see what they can use it for.
RICHARD FREER George do you think it’s worth at this stage asking people what issues they’re facing at the moment in their own live projects that they think maybe 360 could help? Or ask you and Barry whether it could help.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s a good idea.
BARRY BASSNETT Just to finish off one point. The key thing with 360 isn’t actually taking the photograph, it’s what you do with the data later on. And if you think about what you’re doing with the data later on, that can help solve a lot of problems. I’ll give you an example of where it’s worked, I’ll share this one that I’ve done. Can you guys see a plant room? There are three issues to do with 360 that people struggle with. There’s lots of people that have got 360 cameras stuck in a draw and they tried it and sometimes they didn’t think that it would work for them, or they don’t know how to share the information or they don’t know what’s in it.
We’ve been doing a data centre and I just wanted to show you some of the issues that we’ve managed to resolve as well which might inform some of the problems. This is a plant room in a data centre. And this is a website by the way, so I’m looking at this live, so anyone can look at this and I’m happy to send a link through so you can play about with this image and do what you like with it. But the level of detail, there are two challenges in this. The first one is up here. This is all in shadow, or it was until I fixed it, so we can actually see the detail that’s in the dark.
But the other thing as well is there are 360 cameras and there are 360 cameras. In some cases you may want a basic 360 camera and it’s going to be fine, but in this case we want to use this for doing asset management. So what I can do here, we’ve got some simple controls down here to help us navigate round and we can view this and that’s great. But there’s a thousand different people who may want to use this, from asset inspection for asset registers, to the maintenance guy who wants to turn up and see whether he’s got room to put his scaffold in. The beauty of putting it on a website is of course that anybody can view it.
But I just wanted to show you the level of detail that we can get as well, in terms of asset inspection. So, I’ll just zoom in here. If you pick the right camera, this is the sort of detail that you can get out of this. Which means not only are you looking at shapes and pieces of kit, you can actually read things. There’s an interesting thing here, this is the old schematic drawing…that’s sort of the level of detail that you can get out of these 360s. Of course, you don’t have to get this level of detail. But one of the issues that people have is sometimes they are sold cameras and things that won’t actually be able to do that, but that’s the level of detail that you can get if you want to.
So that might open up another set of applications, that’s why I wanted to show you. We can do 360s in the complete dark, we can do 360s to a level of detail where you’re able to see writing from 10 metres away on labels. My partner is a retired valuation surveyor, and what she was saying is that there’s another application in valuation for all councils or HMRC or whoever needs to do valuation of buildings. One of their big problems is the surveyor goes in and they don’t know what that cabinet is, they don’t know what that piece of kit is. The beauty of this sort of system is they can zoom in and see the label of the manufacturer and then look at costs and things like that. So this is the ultimate in remote inspection collaboration tool. Has anybody got any particular applications or ideas that they think we could do?
GEORGE STEVENSON Karen, we were talking about something the other day. You’ve got people that are already doing scans and laser scans and producing stuff. They’re doing that for what purpose?
KAREN OSTLER For valuation, but also they managed to get the buy in from the developer. So that as the development progresses, because it’s a 30-storey building, every two weeks, when they came out of the ground is when they signed up for it, that the team go in and do a full scan of the development as its progressing. And then it just gets layered up on the platform. So, it’s good to get a developer to buy into that at such an early stage.
GEORGE STEVENSON Thomas McDougall, where are you from?
JOE STOTT Tom is part of our scanning team.
GEORGE STEVENSON Has anybody else got any suggestions of projects that they might want to try this on and apply it?
PIERRE VENTER An interesting part in my world would be we need to look at the added value in all cases and some of it can actually be monetised. So Barry, the better the quality of the documents that you’re turning out could in fact be shared, and this sounds very engaged, but the local council would get a benefit. Every single one of these if we identified them as a party that could potentially get information out. The layering of what I call the rose-tinted glasses means that everybody can see what they need to see and the data then overlaid in that.
BARRY BASSNETT You raise a very interesting point, Pierre, about what you can do with 360s. Now, we’re talking about building inspection, but there’s a really interesting application, and I’m going to have to kill you all now I’ve told you about it, but there’s a couple of councils in the UK who are using their own commissioned Google Streetview 360 imagery. So you can get a 360 image camera, stick it on your car, stick it on your Segway, stick it on your electric bike, stick it on your back and walk around and take 360 imagery, or a tour of something that’s not inside. it could be like we’re using it for disability access, for example, for mapping steps between railway stations and bus routes etc.
But there’s a really interesting application that some councils are using it for. They are getting 360 imagery, but they’re using it for property valuation. Normally these 360 tours are done by the highways department looking for potholes and assets and lamps and vegetation that needs clearing away from signs. There’s a couple of councils who are using it for business rate evaluation. And what they’re finding is they might commission say a hundred thousand pounds worth of 360 scanning, but they’re raising one million pounds of extra revenue by reevaluation of business rates, change of usage and things like that.
So sometimes it seems like a pretty mundane application, but almost everybody in the AEC could use 360 imagery, if they start using it and start imagining what they could use it for. I know that it’s two councils that are using it and they’ve got a 10 to 1 ROI on investment in 360s because they’re able to then reevaluate their business rates. Reduce them in some cases. And all they do is they don’t scan the whole town, they just scan the high street and the shopping precincts and those sort of things. And it allows them to legitimately do something that they couldn’t do, they’d need an army of reevaluation people to do that. And they’re just looking at change of usage.
GEORGE STEVENSON Can I just ask Abdullah, is there anything in this that you think might be useful on projects that you’re involved with? Florentina, I know that you’ve got some ideas on this.
FLORENTINA PUNGĂ Yes, I’ve got ideas. The problem that I’ve had is health & safety files and storage of information. No client has ever been concerned after they’ve been given a heath & safety file to maintain that and keep it updated. So every time I have a new project started and I’m asking the client can you please hand over the existing updated health & safety file. It's just with information that is literally never looked at after handing over. And it’s useless to me, it’s useless to anybody really because in some cases the building is really not looking like the handed over information is suggesting.
So having an opportunity to manage that and keep that updated through images, every time there is an element of maintenance replacement, that can be updated then and there, straightaway, without somebody having necessarily being trained in CAD so that they can produce a drawing. And that would make a massive difference in providing accurate pre-construction information, health & safety information, to anyone who needs it. Whether they are just a maintenance contractor coming to replace some bulbs or to do stair repair, concrete repairs.
That would make a massive difference. The truth is that I haven’t seen, yet, anybody using 360 to capture health & safety information, namely health & safety files. Barry, I haven’t seen it, that’s the honest truth, I’m handing over files and files and PDFs and docs and all of that through Wetransfer. In some cases I do that Wetransfer like 3 times because nobody can be bothered to download what’s in the link and the link expires. So that stays, I don’t know where.
BARRY BASSNETT This is how I got into 360 twenty-five years ago. It was for managing health & safety on oil platforms. And we used 360 imagery there to do risk assessment, we used it for attaching videos to show people the evacuation routes, the lifeboat and all sorts of things. So, it has been used for a long time, just not in this sector.
FLORENTINA PUNGĂ Yeah, and then if you think about the building regulations and here structural safety, fire safety, are now playing a very important role, these are the priorities. But think about ventilation and all of those MEP systems that through correct installation, through correct maintenance, can ensure that the buildings can be used safely from an air quality perspective and all of that. And all of these, as soon as you get cracks in the walls, or something becomes faulty, if you can capture that in a picture when you do the scope of works. Scoping projects to be accurate and to say this is where it is, this is what it looks like, this is the problem, can you price for it? It will mean accurate pricing and correct works.
JOE STOTT A question for you, George, I suspect. Just thinking about this and obviously the use case of validating the delivered building versus the design is kind of a no brainer category for me. But have you ever considered starting that process before the construction has started? So, we have full models of the buildings and I’m just dealing those models is problematic because only your BIM users can access them and they are large files etc. And I was just wondering whether there’s a potential use case to produce 360 renders from the model and to kind of start the process ahead of time, so that we can then build upon.
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s an interesting idea because we could tag those, couldn’t we?
BARRY BASSNETT The interesting thing is you can do 360s, you don’t need a camera to do a 360 image, you can do it from the model. That’s something that’s done in the effects business CGI thing, so absolutely, it’s doable. And in some cases that’s preferable because you can start off with that and you can say…you can look at deviations then because what you can do as well is overlay the actual 360 when it’s built against your rendered model. So yes, it’s absolutely doable, it’s one of those things that some people want to do and some people don’t. But absolutely, it’s something that we can do straight away.
JOE STOTT One of the biggest questions that I’ve got is I’m sat in an open office space now and I can see some meeting rooms. So, planning out where those photos should be taken is kind of critical and I’m still not kind of sure how best to go about that. So, starting the process early when I can do three different options and I can kind of proof the process before I get to site would be a good idea.
BARRY BASSNETT Yeah, for sure, one of the key things when we do training on 360 is planning the route. And then documenting that route so that people do the same route when they come back. So different people can do it and follow the same thing because gathering the data in the 360s, there are thousands of these things. The hardest part isn’t the photograph, it’s organising the data. And so you are looking at the same room, you’re looking at a hospital room and you don’t want to have to open up every image to figure out where it is because that’s just painful. You’re going to have to open up the image and view it to see you’re outside room 22 on floor 8. So one of the critical things which is banal and not very sexy, especially when you’ve got great imagery, is just the process of how you organise that.
And that’s one of the things that we try and share as much as we can because it’s the best practice of documenting them. There are loads of people who have bought 360 cameras and they’re just sat in a desk gathering dust because the photographs weren’t good enough quality. But probably more, they didn’t have a way of sharing the information and didn’t have a way of figuring out what the photograph is, they just didn’t understand the way that you do it. My mission is to get 360 cameras out un-dusted.
RICHARD FREER We’re really short of time now. There are people who were mistakenly invited for today and for tomorrow and who have accepted both. Tomorrow’s will be slightly different because we’ll be focusing more on people’s live projects that they’re actually working on at the moment. So don’t feel that you’ve seen it all today because you haven’t, there’s more to come. The second thing, Barry, you mentioned about that project being put on a platform so people can see it. When? Is it live now?
BARRY BASSNETT No, it’s not live now, we’re just about to start gathering the data. We’ll make an announcement when it is live, it’s probably going to be in a few weeks. So it’s not live now, but we’ll make an announcement and then people can start viewing it and collaborating with it.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’d like to just say that we need to have a follow-up. What I would like to do is probably on a one-to-one basis with people just have a chat with them. So I’ll reach out, if I may, if we could have a one-to-one chat. The intention I think of this group is to see how we cannot just work with the concept, it’s how we can actually apply it. And that doesn’t need to cost anybody anything, as Barry said we’ve now got the data centre that’s in Halifax, it’s a massive site, which is kicking off in October. So we’re putting together all of the proprietary stuff for it and then it’s going to be developed starting in October.
So, if you’re interested in getting engaged with that, also the Watney Market project. As Barry said, what we want to try and do is if any other local authorities or any other people that have got an urban facility, if they’re looking to do that type of thing why not try and do it together so that we can learn from each other. I’ll be reaching out to you to arrange a one-to-one, that’s a good thing for us to do, probably the early part of next week. Does that make sense to people? Does anybody disagree with that? Great, OK.
RICHARD FREER So, George will be in touch on the one-to-ones, Barry will be in touch on the live projects and the rest of you I’m sure we’ll see you at the forum in two weeks’ time, or tomorrow for the second follow-up.
CHAT
Patrick Wilson (External)…….One of the first "shocks" that I had in the BIM4H group in 2016 was the separation between procurement and asset management.
Simon Collery (External)…… Not sure if it's directly related but drone information about the Spectrum House fire led to the information that an escape route/gate had been locked after certain remedial work had been done, but at the time the report was written it wasn't possible to say who had locked them.
Flynn, Carolyn @ GWS EMEA (External)…. Project
Brian McKenna (External),,,, Project
Paul Collier (External)….. Project
Tim Aikin (External)…. thermal imaging for window condition?
Adey Badmos (External)…. Project
Patrick Wilson (External)….. Inception, Briefing, Tenant and/or Community Engagement, Planning
Simon Collery (External)… Project
Tim Aikin (External)…. was there a process for permissions to fly the drone?
Flynn, Carolyn @ GWS EMEA (External)…. Hi Tim, yes there are permissions required but mostly it's concerning height and you need to evident that it's for sole purpose of survey. The contractor I used had all the necessary licencing. George Stevenson - I need to leave the office I'm in and go find another to spot to log in from. I'll be back.
Justin Vaughan (External)…. Depending on the weight of the drone there are different permissions required. We always check local restrictions prior to survey
Matt Wilkie (External)…. Got to shoot off, but thanks for the meeting.
Simon Collery (External)… Can they be used by the emergency services during an emergency? Hackney Council has an office that deals with film locations. Thanks all for another great session!
Tim Aikin (External)…. Anyone looking at Climate resilience retro fit. With the heat wave people are talking about mechanical air conditioning rather then shading and passive mitigation. In Italy rolling blackouts happened and it is thought it was caused by the use of air conditioners
Tim Aikin (External)…. With mould, ventilation is critical but the methods of using extractor fans don’t get used as people see it as expelling heated air during the winter. New heat exchanger fans are now a lot lower costs and achieve better outcomes
Patrick Wilson (External)… Retrofitting residential properties under PAS 2035:2023 allow for phased retrofitting and uploading of work done to Truststmard Data warehouse