360 Digital Asset Capture Follow Up Session 2 Meeting 04-07-2025

360 DIGITAL ASSET CAPTURE FOLLOW UP SESSION 2 MEETING 04-07-2025

GEORGE STEVENSON …a couple of projects that we can use to learn and share from as well, so we can talk about that.

RICHARD FREER If you’ve got problems on something that you’re working on at the moment, are they things that maybe 360 could help you with? And if you don’t think it could maybe it’s worth asking Barry, because maybe it could. Maybe you’re wrong, maybe it could actually help you out. It could be very specific to something that you’re doing at the moment.

GEORGE STEVENSON (shares screen). OK, what I’d like to do is just explain where we’re thinking at the moment and make sure that everybody is up to speed. Some of you will have seen some of these things, but it drops into a narrative, as it were. So, the majority of the use of 360s we think is going to be on existing buildings, but there’s obviously 360s being captured on new builds as well, so we can talk about that. But on existing buildings people may have a BIM model, they will have CAD drawings, either PDFs or PWGs. They have COBie data and hopefully they should have health & safety files and O&Ms. And also 360 photographs.

Now, the challenge with that is that typically those are all separate, they’re all disconnected in different files. And the result of that is if anybody’s trying to do any sort of audits or whatever, everything has got to be manually checked and processed. So, that’s where we’ve got problems. What we’re trying to do is bring together those different data sets and connect them all up by basically making them smart enough to be integrated, federated, make them auditable, which is increasingly important, obviously with the Building Safety Act. And also connectable, so that they can connect in to lots of different systems.

And the methodology that we’re using to do that is that if there are BIM models, either old ones or new ones, we can extract the information that they contain, just using standard COBie. But there’s a lot of things that never get modelled, in particular the detailed M&E information. In which case they can be in the form of schedules, so we can pull, for example, iron mongery schedules, or maybe even damper schedules, into a standard format. We can also use technical submittals to connect them to product information. And where all of that fails, we’ve got 360 photographs because the as-built is actually the 360 photograph.

There are very few projects that we come across where the BIM models have actually been completed with all of the information that you need from an asset management point of view. We may argue that they should be, but in practice there’s not normally the commercial driver to do that. So, that also means the 360s make it a lot easier to keep things up-to-date. So, what we’re doing is we’re trying to create the 360s in such a way that they are more searchable. We’re making that so that we can connect information in the 360s to other data sets, like asset libraries. So, one of the things that we’re doing is really creating smart 360s rather than standard 360s that it requires a human to read.

And by doing that it means that they can be connected to all of the other great information sets that may be in different applications, they may just be references, like the Uniclass reference, for example. But we can connect all of those to make them much more easily findable. Now, what Barry’s been showing is the data capture side of things, the 360 capture, and there’s lots of different ways that that can be done. It can be done just with simple 360 cameras on a tripod, which is what a lot of them are being done now. If there’s value in having a proper Lidar scan, maybe being used also for construction purposes, there’s things like Leica, the FARO and the NavVis cameras, which Justin was just mentioning.

So, there’s lots of different ways of capturing the 360s. There’s also a wide range of applications that have been built up increasingly during construction. So these applications are largely taking 360 photos, and the purpose of those is really quality management, reducing risk of claims, also managing claims against subcontractors, I imagine the main contractors would be doing. But those 360s, that’s all that they’re typically used for. But they’re very valuable because they show what was there before spaces were completed. We as Active Plan have been talking to all of these people and we’ve now got relationships with most of them, where we can take the 360s that they produce and 8then use them.

Clearly we’re not the only people that can do this, but what I’m showing you here is how we can take 360s, however they’re being created, and use them in different ways. Now, what are the different ways that we can use? If you’ve been on the previous sessions you will see that we’ve done a huge amount with asset capture. We’ve now done 12,000 spaces, we’ve done 140,000 assets and we’re using that to train Large Language Models to recognise what those items are. But the key thing is that it’s a lot quicker to capture the information using 360s than it is to send surveyors to site. They can be used also, because what we’re doing is turning them into something that’s intelligent, they can be used to validate against existing information.

So if there’s COBie data, if there’s information about what should have been installed, the 360s can be used to validate against those and then identify what’s missing. Or what’s additional to what was in the schedules. We’re now moving on to the next level which is using it for condition assessment. So we’ve got a range of survey firms now starting to look at this from a point of view of being able to do life cycle assessment and condition assessment, without having to send their expensive people to site. So, we’ve got a project at the moment where we’re looking at, I think it’s 800 buildings. That would just be hugely labour intensive, also with lots of different people, so we think that’s a good way forward.

We’ve identified that one of the areas that is probably quite wasteful in the industry is where procurement teams go out to the market and they procure surveys, for example, but they don’t really know how many assets that they’ve got. So we’re thinking procurement could be an interesting team to get involved with. We’ve not spoke to procurement people yet, but if you’ve got procurement people in your organisation, or you're dealing with them, then that might be worth opening up a conversation with. 360 safety, being able to use it to assess, identify risks and safety management and complex areas. 360 access, certainly for PEEPs, the personal evacuation plans, we think 360s could be very useful from that perspective, but also generally identifying where there may be access issues for disabled people.

Fire risk assessments, that’s another one that we have identified talking to people that are producing, or consuming, fire risk assessments, to be able to see the context of these things. 360 O&Ms, so this is being able to navigate around an O&M using the 360 photographs. Now, we think that’s a very interesting thing that we ought to be exploring. And obviously finally, there’s the Golden Thread element. I’m going to pause there for the moment and just ask if anybody has got any suggestions or idea that we’ve not come across yet, that you’d like to contribute.

MATT WILKIE I think it’s important for PFI PPP handbacks because it’s also about the time stamping. So actually having a 360 there is very useful for when you’re actually wanting to validate in the sense of you may have some legacy issues, you may have things like the RDS doesn’t match. It may be the case of fire stopping, it may be the case of checking above ceilings and evidencing it. So a lot of that could be very practical, so that the toing and froing when you get into legalities is reduced, because images are a much easier thing to show the truth that words going backwards and forwards. And then about three different people visiting the same space to look at the same thing. So, I think that’s a key one.

GEORGE STEVENSON I like that one, Matt. So, 360 handback, I don’t know if anybody o the call may get involved in that sort of thing. I think, Justin, you may, That might be an interesting one. Justin, you have a dedicated group within Airey Miller looking at PFI, didn’t you?

JUSTIN VAUGHAN Yes we have, it’s not something we’ve touched on with the 360. But yeah, there is scope there in the future.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, we’ve got information about what’s needed for PFI because we know it quite well, we’ve got lots of PFI contracts on. So that might be worth a conversation on.

JUSTIN VAUGHAN Yeah definitely, we can take that offline.

GEORGE STEVENSON Cool. And Caroline, you’re in a PFI, aren’t you?

CAROLYN FLYNN Yes, I am.

GEORGE STEVENSON OK, does anybody else have any suggestions at all in terms of what we could use 360s for?

BRIAN McKENNA I think you’ve already mentioned a key one which is stock condition surveys for the external of high-rise buildings. Particularly when you're surveying things like balconies and the conditions of balconies, roof spaces, it's a very, very effective way. As long as you get the detail, sufficient detail in the images, it's a very effective way. But combined mounted on a drone, for example. Scanning up the external of an entire block.

GEORGE STEVENSON Absolutely.

JUSTIN VAUGHAN We’ve done that here at Airey Miller, we’ve used drone technology to do a condition survey of a roof and facade. We’ve uploaded the point cloud data from that and then tagged that with points of interest in our system. And then we’ve been able to share our screen with the managing agent for that block and we had a Teams call where we zoomed in to the areas which were of concern. And they were able to get that understanding from that, rather than just getting pictures, was able to use that 3D point cloud model to demonstrate the areas that they needed to obviously look into.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s excellent, is that something that you’d be able to show us at some stage, Justin? Could you show us an example of that?

JUSTIN VAUGHAN Yeah, of course, if you give me 5 minutes I could show you an example.

GEORGE STEVENSON In the meantime, Barry, could you just show what we looked at yesterday, the data centre, could you show that? What we’ve been doing, we’ve got a couple of projects on that we’ve got the opportunity to bring people into, on a voluntary basis. But you can use this to learn and if you’re interested in getting involved in actually actively looking at some of these projects, maybe put your name and ‘project’ in the chat.

JUSTIN VAUGHAN (shares screen). This is the drain footage for one of our projects. They had issues with water ingress on the roof, so we done a drain survey of the building. And what we were able to do was get it in to use the footage to then produce the point cloud data from the drone. And then what we done, we tagged certain areas that we thought were of particular interest. And then we’ve uploaded, tagged more photos to those areas so that they can see it obviously in higher resolution, along with videos that we provided the client.

What we can see from here is if you click on each one it brings you to that area, obviously you can search it in the search bar. So you can see where the facade damage is on all of the areas of the building of concern. That’s just a little flavour of what we have done. And we shared this with the client in a meeting, we got them on a Teams call, and they found it extremely useful.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s excellent. One of the questions obviously that I’m asked when we talk about doing this is how does this relate and compare with an experienced building surveyor going to site and poking things and touching them. Would you say that that’s necessary still? Or are we saying, what’s the sort of productivity gain, for example, of you doing it this way?

JUSTIN VAUGHAN Yeah, I think to a degree obviously with doing this this way, obviously they didn’t need to put scaffolding up to access the roof because as you can see on the top here there’s no actual roof access. So we was able to obviously utilise the drone so they could mitigate the need for the scaffolding to actually get up there and assess it. So this was a first port of call that was able to do that. They could then obviously send this and use this data to send to contractors to price for areas, or send it to facade engineers to look at the issues that the building had.

GEORGE STEVENSON And what about doing condition assessment of windows, for example? Would you be able to do that and say that there’s another 20 years left on those windows?

JUSTIN VAUGHAN You’re always going to need to have your experienced guys onsite to really check things out. Obviously intrusive surveys, finding wall types, all of that sort of thing, you’re not going to find out from a photo or a point cloud. So you’re always going to need that.

GEORGE STEVENSON So, it’s doing that first pass, as it were.

JUSTIN VAUGHAN Yeah, I believe, and obviously it’s identifying areas of concern really.

GEORGE STEVENSON The point about this is what Justin’s doing there, that’s in the NavVis could application and those tags are actually in the application. Whereas what we’re able to do with that, because we use NavVis as well, is take that 360 and add information, well, to actually tie it back to the database which means that’s what I would then call, this is a sort of semi-smart 360. But what we’re actually doing is imbedding the asset data itself, we’re bringing the 360 into the asset data which makes it all connectable and searchable.

CAROLYN FLYNN I just wanted to add on to what Justin and them are doing there. I’ve worked with a contractor, unfortunately I’m not sure what software they were using, but the whole drone thing worked for us because just to do an initial survey. Because the building was at the corner of a busy intersection and it had no roof edging. So the whole point of using the drone was to go on the roof, identify the weak areas of the roof, like I think someone mentioned thermal heating in the comments. And it is, we did it for leaks, so it was able to identify without us having to spend extra of blocking off the roads and going that extra mile.

But initially, we could tell what assets sat on the roof, like your earthing and all of that. What is on the roof, what air con are on the roof and where are the weak points on the roof. So, that’s actually quite good, but I’m not sure what software the contractor used.

GEORGE STEVENSON Barry, there’s two things that I’d like you to show. Show what you did yesterday and also on the data centre, and if you could show the London Cesium.

BARRY BASSNETT OK, yesterday we were talking about 360 imagery and what we call visual asset management has been a term used for the last 20-odd years. But it’s how you use spatial imagery, whether that’s 360 drone imagery or just a simple photograph out of your camera in asset management. What I’ll do first is show the Cesium thing. (shares screen). This project that we started talking about yesterday, can you seen a map of London? One of the projects that we’re working on now is a project where we’re going to be able to use as an exemplar of how you go about documenting a building through its lifecycle.

This is an existing property, it’s not a new build, and there’s all sorts of reasons why in this case Tower Hamlets want this documented. But the platform, and there’s lots of platforms like you’ve just seen the NavVis one and there’s other ones as well. We’re going to be using a slightly different one which allows us to aggregate lots of different bits of information. And if I zoom in here in Eastenders fashion. This is using Google Earth and Google Model, but actually we’re going to be using this template and all of the 3D models. And then we’ll be able to insert.

This here is Watney Market, but what we’ve got here as well…fly down it, this isn’t a particularly good model. We’ve got a 3D model, but what we’re going to be doing is actually producing a much more accurate one of these and using scanning and drone work. And so it will be put into context in this 3D model of the whole city. But what we’re also doing is using 360 imagery to take a tour around this to do a whole slew of things. But we’re able on a website to view all of these interactively, so it could be used for a hundred different applications.

GEORGE STEVENSON The purpose of this, if I can just explain. What Tower Hamlets need is to bring together all of the fire safety information so that they can have compartmentation information, but also information about heating and ventilation and the like. And as far as Watney Market is concerned, we’re going to be going out to procurement in probably a month’s time, to actually get the scanning done. And we’re then going to do 360s of the internals and then turn that into asset information which is then going to go into the rest of the Tower Hamlets portfolio. We’ve got 60-odd buildings that we’ve already had done, Ridge did the scans.

What we want to do is to use this as a project so that if there are other similar projects that other councils and local authorities and housing associations may be doing, we can learn from each other on that so bringing that together. This is another project, just to be clear we’ve got two projects that we’re opening up for collaboration. This one is a data centre, a large site in Halifax that is going to be substantially renovated over the next 6 months. And we’ve taken the 360s to be able to feed towards that.

BARRY BASSNETT What we’re doing here is using 360 imagery which is fairly straightforward for most people to do. But the challenge with 360 is just getting a reasonable definition so that you can use it for asset management. But in particular areas lots of 360 cameras struggle when they’re trying to do plant rooms because areas like this are not lit. So what we’ve done here is just taken a 360 and done some tweaking on the processing, just to brighten it all up. But we’ll be using this 360 imagery for both the data centre and for the Watney Market project. And stitching these together to produce what I call a visual asset register or visual asset management.

But these projects will be open to everybody to try and come and experiment with. We will be putting these online for people to contribute and use, just to test different things out. Because I do 360 there’s lots of different platforms that you can use. You can use the NavVis one, there’s things like Eyesight, you can even use Google Streetview if you want to. But what we’re trying to do is come up with a simple way, and not a standard way but like a best practice which we share as a community so you can take out. We’ll be able mix drone footage, like the inspection of the facades and the balconies. 360 internally, so it could be for asset management, for plant rooms or condition surveys.

The point of it is it’s one common platform that you could try and do everything with and for us as a community to play about and use as a test demonstration site to figure out what’s the best practice that we can share. Does that make sense to everyone?

RICHARD FREER No, it’s the first that I’ve really heard about this. George, you said about collaboration, what does that mean? Collaboration on the market one and this one.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, people who are interested in using 360s can come on and understand how to actually identify assets. There’s going to be libraries that they can use to tag things or assess condition or look at health & safety risks. Simon’s just put in the chat an example of a door being locked. So, to be able to walk through a building virtually using the 360s, but because we will have them as intelligent 360s to be able to both add information to them and also connect them to other things. So, being able to connect them to do risk assessments and things like that, that was the…

RICHARD FREER So our people will be able to do that? Or just to view it?

BARRY BASSNETT If you image this as a sandbox for anybody who wants to pay about with it they can do, and experiment and look at different things? The point is to actually do things, if they want to tag things up we’ll show them how to tag things up, simply. And there’s different granular ways of applying this. Some people may just want to, Justin, like you were doing on the balconies and using NavVis for tagging. It might be something just really simple, this is something I need you to look at Mr. maintenance man when you go in. Just communicating a notes, it might be as basic as that. But also it can be much more sophisticated where you’re actually linking these 360s or drone imagery or ortho imagery to a database.

Where you can then look and start to tag and manage your asset information, for whatever application you may want. It might be to do with Regulation 38, it might be to do with Martyn’s Law which is going to be a big thing we’re going to have to get prepared for next year. So, we’re just trying to come up with a sandbox so that people can play. And then they’ll be a community like myself who you can come on and ask questions and say we’d like to be able to do this. And then we’ll go right OK, what’s your problem? Let’s see how we can use this and 360 and a database like George’s or whoever’s to give ease of use.

There’s already people saying we used drones for looking at roof spaces and things like that. That’s like 101, that’s straightforward. But there’s some really sexy things that you can do with this technology. so, the idea is to come up with two projects that we’re working on where we’ve got control if it, but we can share it with the rest of the community.

BRIAN McKENNA I think it’s a brilliant idea. Shall we put sandbox in the chat if you want to be part of that?

BARRY BASSNETT Yeah, that would be perfect. If you want to put sandbox and then I can start a dialogue and we’ll set up a separate channel for those people who want to do it.

GEORGE STEVENSON We have to recognise, just to be clear, we’re using a couple of real projects for this that we’re managing. So, we’re using it as a learning exercise, both for us and for the clients. But because of the fact that they’re in a database, when you’ve done your tagging and things we probably won’t retain those things because, quite frankly, we need to understand where they’re coming from. The intention of it is just to get people to think outside the box as to how they’re going to want to interface with these things.

BARRY BASSNETT Just to be clear, there’s going to be two. We’ll have our own production environment that we control, but we’ll open up a duplicate as a sandbox. So, you’ll be able to add and it’s not going to impact our deliverables because we’ve got to keep control over that. The point is you can go on it and break it and no one is going to die.

That’s really our concept is to try and share best practice amongst us. I know a bit about how you can view things in spacial imagery, other people are experts of SQL. We’re going to have subject matter experts who may well be able to go around and say review particular aspects, like let’s look at the fire systems etc. Other people might be experts in disability access, other people in retail space and valuation. The point is let’s have one environment and these are both ideal ones, Watney Market in particular because it’s such a mixed use.

GEORGE STEVENSON We’ve got at least one or possibly two different types of projects. One is a health trust, so we’re hoping to have a health trust up next week that we can look at. And also schools. So we can look at that as well. So, we’ve got something there that’s different use cases that people can access. We’re experimenting with this by the way, as a collaborative venture. Sometimes collaborations work really, really well and sometimes you’re in an empty room, as it were. But I think this is one good way of doing it.

BARRY BASSNETT I think the other interesting thing is people don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s really to find a way of showing and having a real live job that we can show different things on. And other people contribute as well, there’s going to be people who are experts in window renovation or a million different things. But if we can show it in one exemplar where everybody can access it and understand it. And then communicate oh, we’ve just added a new workstream and a video on Youtube, click on this and it will show you how to do it. That’s sort of what I’m trying to do to spread it around.

And the visual asset data, the spherical imagery, the point cloud, the 3D model, the Cesium environment where we can insert this directly into a 3D city. And click on all of the HRBs and click on that and then you’ve got all of the data associated with those HRBs.

RICHARD FREER George, you’ve been doing one-to-ones with people in different things, but you’ve not done anything on this.

GEORGE STEVENSON No, that’s absolutely right.

RICHARD FREER Is that feasible? Because a lot of people got a lot of help out of that, didn’t they?

GEORGE STEVENSON Yes, absolutely, basically I run out of time a little bit. But I’ve got some time next week, so if anybody is interested in, I think to some extent this probably would start as a one-to-one conversation. Because you’ll probably want to talk to colleagues within your organisations to whether you’ve got some ideas. Because the purpose of this, we’re opening up our projects to let other people get engaged with them, but we’d obviously like you to do the same.

So, if you’ve got projects within your own organisation where you may be doing this type of thing, and you’re capturing 360s for example, we’d like you to also open those up so that we can all learn from them and do things together. So, if you’d like to have an initial 15-minute one-to-one with me sometime next week, just drop ‘one-to-one’ into the chat.

RICHARD FREER Put ‘one-to-one’ in the chat and then Jiss will sort through that and we’ll get hold of George’s diary and see when he’s free and put up a Doodle poll or something.

GEORGE STEVENSON Has anybody got any thoughts as to what we’ve just been talking there? Any suggestions?

BRIAN McKENNA I think it’s really great what you’re doing here. And for me I work for Camden Borough Council in data architecture, so I’m interested very much in the data side of this. And what this is really doing, it’s informing a future strategy for asset management. All of this new technology will help form the basis for a future strategy of asset management within councils and housing associations. Because like Barry said, when you don’t know what you don’t know and that’s part of the problem. People don’t know this technology exists, they don’t know the great work that you’re doing. So I think it can come right up at that strategy level.

BARRY BASSNETT You’re absolutely right, Brian, there’s some simple things. And what I want to try and do with this is show, I’ve got my ideal what best practice should look like, but other people have other things that will help improve on that. So we start with something and then we can iteratively improve it. Like there’s one simple thing that we’re going to be doing on this which is how do you make sure you’re taking photographs as you go through the years in the same place so you can compare like with like? People don’t think about that, they just think I can walk around with a 360 camera on my head, and that’s the easy part.

So we’re going to be looking at those things and the idea is to try and get best practice to suit what your slide, George, at the beginning where you can use 360s, all of those different applications. There’s a different way of approaching each of those and maybe what we’ll try and do over…this isn’t going to be something that happens all next week, this is a yearlong project.

BRIAN McKENNA But I think one of the crucial bits, and you’ve already alluded to this, is where you attach the metadata. And it’s the metadata that makes everything searchable within a database schema, within everything. Attaching accurate asset metadata to different points on this is the crucial bit for me.

BARRY BASSNETT You’re absolutely right. I look at this whole what I call visual asset management, it’s about two things. It’s about getting good quality photographs in any lighting conditions. But the main, and you hear me use this word a lot, findability, how do we find the right image and make decisions about it. So you need three things. You need to know where the photograph was taken, you need to know when it was taken and you need to know what it’s a photograph of. And that is all metadata. It’s really boring and banal, but that’s where the usability really kicks in.

Because then you can start linking it to things like George’s database or some other database, or Maximo or some IoT device looking at sensors of carbon dioxide, there’s a zillion applications. But you’re absolutely right, it’s about metadata. I always use this analogy or the metaphor of you’ve got a fantastic 3D model or 360 imagery and it’s like having an atlas on your coffee table. It looks great, but unless you’ve got an index at the back it’s useless.

BRIAN McKENNA And the other massive use case is typical 1960s high-rise buildings where you don’t have a lot of what I’d call raw data. You might have a few PDFs, you’ve got a very sparse set of data. So you have to look at technology to build up a picture where you can manage those assets in a more effective way.

GEORGE STEVENSON Absolutely. Just to build on what Justin was showing earlier. NavVis the camera people, they’ve built an interface for their cameras and that’s what a lot of camera companies do, which is great. So Matterport, for example, a lot people use Matterport to tag in Matterport the information. But what you’re doing there, you’re just tagging it in that tool. So in other words, that isn’t shareable. You can share a view of that on the NavVis platform, just like you can with Matterport and with OpenSpace, but the information itself, the tagging is not managed in a proper database that is connectable.

So, what we’re doing is making it so that it is all connectable, so it builds a lot more value on that. And means that you’re then connected into lots of different, maybe connecting into the O&M, for example, so you’ve got the documentation against that asset in that location. Or the manufacturer’s details.

BRIAN McKENNA I could’t agree more, George, it has to be integrated in. The real value is when you start to integrate this in, all of this into your core asset management system. Whatever that system is, generally it will be database driven, it has to have an integration into that system.

GEORGE STEVENSON One of the things that we are looking at the moment, and we’ve actually started talking with two or three of the big housing maintenance software providers, is actually having it so that we can have a connection directly into their for doing small works. That’s for two reasons, one is that you can identify something in the 360 that requires an action.

And that can be kicked off straight away, with a view of the thing that needs to be fixed in 360, which means that they’re not likely to come along and fix the wrong one that happens quite a lot. And also, when work is being carried out you can use it as a way of limiting the risk of maybe somebody that’s coming along and putting some new cables in through a compartment wall. Which wall are they going through? Do they therefore need…should there be a permit to work for that?

BRIAN McKENNA Exactly, and even at a basic level that 3D imagery that we’ve been shown, at a basic level it helps you to prioritise your remedial work. If you’ve got let’s say 70 high-rise blocks, how do you…it’s quite manual, it’s quite labour intensive to go out and do physical inspections to prioritise your work. And that’s a big thing, to be able to prioritise which buildings you should be working on.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yes, that’s a very good point and that’s one of the things that we’d like to do with this…you’ve not shown the Cesium yet, have you Barry?

BARRY BASSNETT It’s the same platform. Cesium is a user platform which allows you to basically put the whole planet or a whole city in a viewable place. And Cesium actually uses Google Earth’s ties to do that, but the beauty of Cesium is that you can put your own models and your own point clouds and your own things into it. If anybody is interested in learning, George offered the one-to-ones. I in my LinkedIn account, talk about this quite a lot.

So if you’re not following me on LinkedIn, please follow me because I talk daily about these sort of things and link to blog sites and articles. It might be a useful thing, because it’s not just this community that we’re talking to, there are other communities. It's not just this group, there is a much wider audience that you may want to plug into. I’m using LinkedIn as the major conduit for sharing information and best practice. And trying to avoid, I’ve made thousands of mistakes over the years and I don’t want you to make them.

GEORGE STEVENSON Is there anybody else on the call that’s interested in asking questions? Or have you got projects that you think you might be able to use 360s on? Clearly we can have a chat on a one-to-one basis if that helps, but have you got any ideas at the moment?

BARRY BASSNETT Just to share one, the reason I was late is I just got off a conversation where we’re talking about 360s. And this is actually the sexiest application of 360s I’ve ever come across and it’s actually to have a library for film sets and film locations. If you want to film something there’s a library of all of these places around the planet, stately homes and grungy areas and spaces. And someone wants me to compile a library of these. We go from fire stoppers to film production sets and stuff like that, it’s just a fascinating field.

CAROLYN FLYNN Barry, on that filming, it’s quite interesting because I have a drone and like when I go fell walking in the Lake District, my drone follows me. It’s just a DGI so it’s quite easy to work with. And I do like short filming of that. Is that the sort of filming that you’re talking about? And just filing that away in bits and pieces.

BARRY BASSNETT No, it’s really what they call location scouting. So if I want to do the next Game Of Thrones or a house thing, it’s showing people, directors and camera men and the locations people who have got to put the food trucks for the film crew around. So, it’s a way of actually showing environments and then people say we need to book that to film X, Y and Z. But yeah, you will by accident come across some great location sites and they may well want to upload that so if someone wants to do the next Ivanhoe or Rob Roy or Robin Hood film, there’s a location.

But 360 immersive technology gives you the ability to be there from anywhere. And whether you’re doing it with your iPhone or your drone, or you’re doing it as a more robust procedure where you’re doing hundreds of these to document your assets. It’s all about some simple technology and trying to make it so that you don’t have to spend a lot of IT and give your IT person a heart attack.

GEORGE STEVENSON One of the things that I think we’d also like to talk about is how we can take EPC data and apply that to buildings, apartments and things like that. Now, that’s something that I think would be useful, but I don’t know of the people that are on here that are involved in social housing, would being able to look at energy performance and things like that be useful at this sort of level?

BRIAN McKENNA Yeah, I think so George, absolutely.

GEORGE STEVENSON Why? How would you use that?

BRIAN McKENNA The EPC, as you know Camden have got a lot of social housing, so they get external contractors to actually do the EPC and they take it in. And then they import it in to their internal systems. But I’m not too sure that they get it in as raw data, I think it just comes in as PDFs, I’ll need to double check this. But if you can get the raw data, then obviously like anything else it’s much easier to manipulate that, to search it, to find it. They also do things like scenario based, how to improve your energy performance, like maybe double glazing, triple glazing. So, they’ll run through scenarios on how to get your building more energy performant, basically.

GEORGE STEVENSON That’s a very interesting use case actually because you’re identifying what needs to be done and then you’re using the 360s and the asset information model to identify, maybe over a 2-year programme or something like that, how you can prioritise things.

BRIAN McKENNA Prioritise to get the energy performance much better, yeah. They do scenario based things like if you do this X, Y and Z, replace all of your windows with double glazing, scenarios like that, your building being much more energy efficient.

GEORGE STEVENSON Dave Williams, do you have a view on that?

DAVE WILLIAMS Yeah, funnily enough one of the things that we were talking about in another meeting was around being able to see in to roof voids to check levels of insulation and all that sort of stuff. And I can see where the cameras would probably be ideal for capturing that information as a visual thing, rather than just the raw data that gets put on to an EPC.

GEORGE STEVENSON Is anybody, with the new Awaab’s Law that’s come in, the mould law, is that kicking in with social housing now in terms of looking at…because there’s a range of different things isn’t there? There’s obviously the ventilation side of things.

DAMIANA ONIPEDE Yes, and that’s linking in to future discussions around processes. We’ve redesigned for ? 57mins 9secs mould repairs processes as well. And we’re ensuring that we’re able to flag these or be able to track these evidences as part of the TSMs. So that’s going on within the repairs of space and then also linking in to building residents safety.

GEORGE STEVENSON What about sensors, are you installing humidity sensors and things like that?

DAMIANA ONIPEDE I don’t entirely know, but I know that we do have some carbon monoxide sensors in some of our building, but I’m not sure if we have humidity sensors as part of that initiative.

GEORGE STEVENSON And the other big one that’s under way at the moment I think is district heating systems and how that heat is then delivered to individual, there’s legislation that’s kicking in on that as well. I’m just thinking of different initiatives that may be all benefitting from the 360 and the connected information. Any thoughts on that?

BARRY BASSNETT There’s a project that I’m working on at the moment where we’re looking at IoT in 360 imagery. In schools looking at carbon dioxide levels, because apparently that’s what sends children to sleep in the afternoon, high CO2 levels, we’re looking at what they can do for ventilation. But that is using 360 so they can actually see things, but at the same time they have to have a 3D model so that they can monitor and then manage the airflow models. So that’s an as-built Revit model that they’re using with the volumes and things.

But there’s just hundreds and hundreds of applications and I think having the sandbox is a platform where we can try different ideas out and collaborate and share things. And just recording simple Youtube videos of how we can do it and share those amongst us. I’m patently aware that a lot of the things we need subject matter experts to help us develop those things.

DAVE WILLIAMS Quite interesting, you’ve mentioned carbon dioxide. So, carbon monoxide sensors and smoke sensors are legally required. With carbon monoxide particularly whether there’s gas or solid fuel in the property. Interestingly, in the actual government legislation, they themselves make the mistake where they talk about carbon monoxide in one area, and then another area they mention carbon dioxide. And it’s monoxide that is the one that tends people to be and also the one that’s supposed to be legally in place. Often what happens is the gas engineer will go in and if it’s a combi boiler and they will check that sensor and replace it if necessary. But yeah, it’s an interesting thing that even the legislation confuses carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

BARRY BASSNETT Yeah, we’re all looking at legislation crafted by non subject expert civil servants. Just look at what’s going through parliament at the moment, there’s just so much obfuscation and ambiguity. That’s just the nature of the thing, it’s how we interpret that safely. But no, you’re absolutely right, it’s just looking at some of the stuff you get you have to think who actually wrote this.

RICHARD FREER Let’s wrap up with a reminder of the things for you to put in the chat if you’re interested in pursuing. Sandbox which is the platform, the project that you can get access to and basically play around with, so put ’sandbox’ in the chat if you want to get involved in that. George’s one-to-ones, anybody that wants to have a preliminary chat with George about progressing and getting a bit more detail of the kind of things that you’re looking for yourself and how this can help you, put ‘one-to-one’ in the chat.

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.

Tim Aikin (External)…. thermal imaging for window condition?

Patrick Wilson (External)….. Inception, Briefing, Tenant and/or Community Engagement, Planning
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.

Justin Vaughan (External)…. Depending on the weight of the drone there are different permissions required. We always check local restrictions prior to survey

Simon Collery (External)… Can they be used by the emergency services during an emergency?
Hackney Council has an office that deals with film locations.

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 dont 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 retofitting and uploading of work done to Truststmard Data warehouse