360 DIGITAL ASSET CAPTURE MASTER CLASS MEETING 27-06-2025
LEE KENNEDY …if something needs to be replaced on the holistic view, who’s put in through Building Control for that? So if we look at what is notifiable, if it’s a change to the fire safety provisions or you have to update the fire safety information, then it’s notifiable. Well, when it becomes notifiable the work has to go through the process of notifiable work.
GEORGE STEVENSON The main reason I just wanted to raise it is I think that yours is a really good use case for being able to use 360. So, we can perhaps pick up on that towards the end of the session.
BARRY BASSNETT Thank you for joining, it’s a great audience and hopefully I’m going to give you some information today which is going to be useful for you, but also helpful for you to convey to your bosses and your clients because it’s actually quite often them that need to know about this. As we’re going through if you want to put any questions in the chat and then we’ll come to those at the end. I’m going to skip through this fairly quickly, it’s a fairly big subject. On the face of it it looks straightforward, but as you’ll see there’s lots of considerations and we’re going to go through that.
What I’m going to do now is share my screen. So why 360 imagery, why is it so important? Just a bit of background so that you understand where I’m coming from. I’ve been doing 360 imagery and asset management for 25 years, so I’m coming at it from a point of view of all the mistakes that I’ve made, hopefully you won’t make them. And to try and give you an introduction as to what you may need to think about for 360. So, why is it so important for something like asset management? For me it does a number of different things.
It allows you to look at the complete visual context. Where is it? What’s it in relation to? What other associated products are there? It uses fairly simple technology to actually show that. Basic cameras and basic photographic skills, and we’ll go through some of the myths and legends shortly. It’s pretty low cost equipment, we’re not talking about many mega thousands of stuff and it’s very easy to get into. It’s also crucially easy for IT delivery, it’s not going to give your IT manager a heart attack when you say you want to do this. Because an awful lot of the stuff doesn’t necessarily impact his workflow.
It also allows you to use it as a portable platform as well. You can use 360 as a way of taking your plant and viewing it from anywhere, but also view it on the plant as well. So, you can actually walk around with this sort of asset management system and populate it from your tablet or your phone. Crucially for me, it allows you to collaborate to any skill level. Anyone who can fog up a mirror can use Google Streetview and I’ve got people using it from the CEO down to the basic technician. But overall I think the key for me is the way that it communicates with immediacy.
As they say, a picture tells a thousand words, 360 does a lot more than that. And rather than write reams and reams of text backwards and forwards, just showing people makes life a lot easier. So, what are the things that we need to think about? What we’re trying to do with this is ask questions and the key issue is we’re asking three questions from the photograph: where on the planet is it taken? And where specifically in the building?
Because we’re looking at context and this idea of putting things into 3D. We are hardwired to think in 3D, if I asked all of you where you’ve left your car keys, you create a 3D model in your brain and you can retrieve it. We’re hardwired to think in 3D and we’re hardwired to think in space as well, so 360 is a simple way of delivering that. But what are we doing these photographs for? Basically, most of the photographs are trying to ask the question what has changed? So, we might take a snapshot, but then we may want to see how things have changed over a period of time. That might be dilapidation or it might be before repair or after repair.
Because without understanding the lifetime of an asset it’s very difficult for us to manage, so that’s one of the key aspects, we’re answering the question when. And the other thing is what is it a photograph of? We’ve got 360 imagery, but what’s in it? And there’s no point just having a 360 image with a file name, that’s useless, we need to know the content, otherwise we can spend ages and ages looking through photographs of mages without finding the right one. So what we’re going to do in the next hour is try and address some of these exactly, and also look at a few other things.
What I want to do first is dispel some of the myths. The challenge of 360 imagery is that it’s 360, so we’re capturing lots of things that we don’t necessarily want to capture. If I’m taking a photograph with my iPhone or my normal phone, the camera does some special averaging and gives you the ideal exposure, looking in one direction. The problem with 360 is you get different lighting conditions. I’ve got the sun coming over my shoulder, I’ve got a ceiling void that’s not lit. So what we get there is glare and overexposure and details can be hidden in the shadows. The good news is that we can cope with all of those.
We also get things like people capture. The camera itself is operated by someone the person is likely to be in unless we have a special procedure. Again, we can overcome that. But the other thing as well, it gathers information that we need to fix like faces. And one of the thongs that we need to do legally in some circumstances is remove those faces and blur them. Good news again, there’s easy ways of doing that. And the other issue that we’ve got is security and security capture. Are we capturing security equipment that might not necessarily want to be shared? So, we have to limit access to these.
But also there’s simple things like…everyone of us has probably moved house and seen 360 tours. The police will tell you they hate them because basically it’s giving the burglar the eye opener, it allows you to case the joint from Rightmove. So, there are certain things to think about with security. But what I want to do is get some of the myths of 360 out of the way and debunk some of them. I hear this a lot and it’s largely because people don’t know what they don’t know, which is absolutely fair enough. First off, you can’t take accurate measurements with 360.
The reality is while a single 360 image alone might only yield approximate visual measurements, it’s a critical component when you integrate other technologies. Like combined with photogrammetry, we use multiple overlapping images, or Lidar scanning. So you can generate highly accurate 3D models and point clouds, from which you can get precise engineering grade measurements, or survey grade measurements from it. Now, in most cases you don’t need that, we’re just looking at taking photographs of what is there, but you can do this if you have the right workflow.
The other one is 360 images are just for marketing, for virtual tours and entertainment. We’ve seen those, if you go to Rightmove to buy a house you’ll have a virtual tour, you’ll have someone sticking a 360 helmet on their ski helmet or a canoe blade or whatever. They’re perfectly valid, but it goes a lot more. That’s what we call prosumer cameras, and it’s great to do that, but it’s much, much more. It’s popular, but it replies for me 9mins 53secs, they also give you a robust, reliable, verifiable documentation. It gives you the ability to do remote inspection, automate things like progress tracking. It gives you detailed condition monitoring and it also allows you to create really comprehensive training and reference materials.
The next one, capturing 36 imagery is difficult and requires specialised photographic training. No, my mum who is 86 does some of it, it’s not that hard. There are certain things that you need to think about. I can teach anybody to do 360 imagery in a very short period of time, to be able to cope with dark spaces, light spaces, working in confined spaces and things like that. The next thing I hear is stitching. Some people say that the stitching is perfect or is terrible and visible and so it doesn’t look very nice. Well, the point is if you know what you’re doing and you know the right tools to use, stitching can be almost perfect and you don’t necessarily see it.
Another one, 360 imagery replaces human inspection or traditional surveying methods. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think what it does is augment those subject matter experts. It enables remote prescreening, so most people can see a fire extinguisher or a fire alarm, but it may need subject matter experts to add detail to it. It at least gives you a preliminary fast, quick way of looking at things. And then you can allocate resources to that later on and add the subject matter expertise to it. The next one is 360 video. There’s two aspects to 360 imagery, we can use video or imagery. People say 360 video isn’t good enough, it’s too complex and you can’t search it.
Well, it’s true, but there are ways that you can use 360 video excellently and it produces fabulous results and can be the difference between a job working and not. So, some people talk about 360 video and worry about it, but actually it’s a great addition to it. So, let’s go onto some more of these myths and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty. All 360 cameras produce the same quality of image. Not true, you can get things like a prosumer device for a couple of hundred pounds and go way, way up to 50-60,000 pounds if you want to. However, the main issue really is which camera do you use that’s appropriate for the job.
If I’m doing documentation of a cathedral with 360 imagery, I’m not going to use a cheap 360 camera and stick it on a skateboard. So, understanding that there are different cameras for different purposes is really important. I’ve heard this in conversations that 360 imagery has no place in what we might call the established BIM world or things to do with COBie etc, etc. Working by itself, yeah you’re right, but if you work alongside these things then you’ve got the ability to apply the really robust, strong metadata conventions and practices. And we can also adhere to standards like COBIe.
So, what we get is a seamless linking of this immersive environment with the spreadsheet, which is much easier to communicate to our procurement people, to our FM people. If they can see what you’re talking about and it’s not just a number or an asset name, it makes life a lot easier, it’s easier to communicate complex ideas or maintenance issues or things like that. So, for me it’s the missing link between BIM and FM, or it could be. Also I hear people say that it’s impossible to capture 360 images in dark spaces, like roof spaces or things like that. That’s complete rubbish.
You can do and I can show you how you do that. You only limitation on 360 is the minimum focus distance on the camera. Obviously if I’m trying to put it down a drainpipe, that’s not going to work, but I could put it in a one metre culvert or something like that, and I’m still going to be able to make it work. You’ve just got to know a bit about photography and the camera that you choose. The other thing I hear is that 360 data is too large to manage to store and share effectively. I think this is the biggest single thing that I come across, there must be dozens, hundreds, even thousands of 360 cameras sat in draws doing nothing. Because people have bought it and thought this is a panacea, it’s a magic bullet.
Well, the camera is just the first part. The much more interesting thing for me is what do you do with it later on? How do you find it? How do you store it? How do you share it? Because you might be taking thousands of 360 images of your asset, but they’re no good if you can’t find what you’re looking for. So, there are simple strategies to allow you to do that. The other last one is you need costly high-end equipment to get valid 360 data. No, you don’t, this is something you can do mostly with your phone.
You can do it with your iPhone if you want to do it that way, it’s not the ideal piece of kit, but you certainly can. But you can spend a lot of money on more expensive systems. It depends on the type of job that you’re doing. If I’m documenting a city and I want to do it with 360 cameras, I can do that. But if I’m documenting a phone box, I could do that too. It is not like you need to spend a lot of money like a Lidar scanning system, you can do it for a couple of hundred pounds. And you can equip everybody in your organisation with the same camera and adopt that very easily.
And that’s probably where the benefits come is the more people use 360, the more people are going to benefit and the more your organisation, and your stakeholders, your clients, you customers, your procurement suppliers, your supply chain. Because this is not just about you, it’s about using 360 to communicate right across the board, with all of your stakeholders and partners.
Now let’s go onto these cameras. There are basically three sorts of cameras you can use. There’s a camera which I call the one shot. You’ve got GoPros, Ricohs, the Insta360s, these are what I would call prosumer devices. They really came from the leisure market and consequently because they’re in the leisure market, they’re really designed for quick shooting, not long-term shooting and stuff. Excellent quality ranging in price from a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars, and they are what we call one shot. They use a twin lens, one looking forwards and one looking backwards, and they stitch these images together mechanically, looking at the calibration that they get from the image capture device.
Most of them you can get them in 360 video or static images and there are different times that you would use each of those. The idea really is they’re simple and they’re portable, you can put it in your back pocket or your briefcase. It’s very simple, you’re not walking around with big expensive kit that attracts attention. It’s very simple and everyone can use them, some of these things are almost like a wallet size, they are simple and portable. However, there are some limitations with them if you’re doing a lot of asset management jobs. If I’m just going out to do a photograph of a house or one property, perfectly fine.
But if I’m going to document a paper mill or a nuclear plant or a school or a hospital, it may not be the ideal tool. It will do it for you, but there’s some limitations. Those limitations are they are limited by the light conditions that they can operate it, the minimal HDR high dynamic range. So, if you’ve got bright sunlight or dark areas, it’s difficult in a 360 image to get all of that perfectly exposed, so you’ll have glaring, you’ll have bits that are missing. You’ve always got the operator visibility error in visibility probable, because someone has got to hold it and it’s a 360 camera, so you or your stick or your tripod or something might be in the way. And quite a lot of people use the press timer release runaway and hide method, which is perfectly valid but extremely slow and not really good in a sports hall or a long corridor with locked doors, like I did last year in a prison.
I couldn’t use that. The good news is that you don’t have to use that, you can remove yourself from it, we’ll come to that later on in some field tips that we’ve got. For me the issue for these is just the battery life. If I’m going out and doing lots of work the battery life isn’t that great. So, you’ve constantly got to keep them charged up or find a place to charge them and then charge them up again, because an awful lot of them don’t have removable batteries, it’s inbuilt. So, while they’re great for short terms bursts, they can be a bit of a problem. The other issue is what you do with the image storage and transfer.
An awful lot of these use an iPhone or an Android app and you download the images on to that on your phone and then you’ve got to move themselves otherwise. Some have built in SD cards which means you can just take it out, store the SD card and put another one back in, which is much the better way. If it hasn’t got an SD card I wouldn’t touch it because it’s just going to drive you nuts. And then the other problem that you’ve got is image management. You’re going to be taking lots and lots of photographs, where in that building is it? If you are in a plant room you’ve got lots of photographs of pipework, whereabouts is that? You’re going down a corridor or a high-rise building, which floor are you on?
And the only way that you can figure that out is by actually opening up an image and reading the number on the door, or the number on the boiler or something like that. So, in terms of image management, these will get you out of jail, they’re great systems for doing short things. But if like me, we’re doing 360 imagery of big buildings, schools, hospitals, factories, council offices, there are other systems that I would probably use. But to be fair, I’ve always got one of these in my bag because they’re great for infill and all sorts of other things. The second sort of camera is a one shot mobile. These are sort of at the big end, if I wanted to do 360 of a whole park or town or a university campus or something like that externals, you have these mobile systems.
And these are quite expensive, but they save you hours and you can mount them on a vehicle, on your car, your bicycle or segway, on your all-terrain vehicle, I’ve even seen them on a gold buggy. One of the more interesting applications I’ve got at the moment is mounting them on wheelchairs for looking at wheelchair or disability access mapping, which I think is a fabulous application for this. But then also you can apply it on unmanned, so you can look at things remotely on a drone, on a boat or a thing to go under a corvet or a drain or something like that. So those are multi-shots and what they’re taking is they give you much more resolution.
They have some limitations as well in that they’re not great at coping with big dynamic range, but at the same time if I want to ma a disaster zone after a hurricane or an earthquake or something like that, that’s what you would go. So, these are the high-end. But then we come on to probably the camera that I personally use the most, what we call multi-shot. And multi-shot basically is any camera with an interchangeable lens. And then you will put that on to a nodal ninja or a nodal bracket which means that you rotate it around in different positions and you get overlapped images. Now, that sounds like a bit of a pain, but trust me it can be as quick as just a one-shot because you’re not having to run away.
You are always behind the camera, so you’re never in the shot, so you don’t have to press the button and run and find somewhere to hide. So, if you use that, you’ve already got some benefit, but there are more benefits about using a different sort of camera. So, it’s any camera, it could be a APC, a small point and shoot camera, or it can be a much bigger and more expensive professional grade where you get much higher resolution and much better dynamic range. The advantage that you’ve got, it gives you a complete 360, there’s no area that it won’t take. So, you’ve got complete 360 which also includes a tripod and the roof space and you’re getting a great image that’s consistent, both for lighting and definition right the way across.
They also allow you to do what I call hybrid shooting, so you can mix video and static images. So you can record a video of a certain area and then use 360 imagery from that and static images. So, you can mix them both and sometimes just having a video of you opening the box or doing something, showing how you can use the same camera for recording instructions or evacuation routes, or a zillion other things. It can also cope with any lighting conditions. So I use this to do tunnels at night in the middle of the country that’s unlit, to brights, I do a lot of heritage work in the desserts of Jordan, bright summer sunshine.
So, it can cope with lots of dynamic range in the same scene, bright sun shining over my shoulder into a dark space. Which a normal camera, and certainly one of the one shot ones, wouldn’t be able to deal with. The other issue really is these are designed really so battery life and storage are really easy to manage because most have removable batteries, so you keep your batteries on charge and it takes five-seconds to replace it. You’re not stopping, you don’t have to wait, and also you’ve got much higher memory storage. The system that I use has two SD cards, I can shoot all day and I don’t have to worry about that. And that can be thousands of images.
It has much higher resolution because you can get Sony high end ones, 61 megapixel for every image. And sometimes you can stitch like 18 or 19 images together. It also allows you to do what we call tethered solution. You can attach your computer or your iPad to this and use that to remotely control it. And also importantly to rename files as you’re taking them. So normally when you get the image file it’s just a list of meaningless numbers. But what you can do if you have a tethered solution, you can say ah, this is room 2104, this is the corridor, this is floor 5. So you can actually name the image relevant to where it is.
And this sounds a little trivial, but trust me it saves you hours and hours and hours of time. Because ordinarily what you have to do if you don’t have this is you have to open every single image to see where it was, because the number by itself doesn’t mean anything. OK, there are other strategies that we can go to which will help you with that. But the other thing about a tethered solution, you can actually use it for remote operations as well. So, I can attach my phone to it, I can attach…if I want to stick something on a pole up into a suspended ceiling or a void or lower it down into confined spaces like a manhole or inspection cover, under computer flooring, above suspended ceilings, I can do that and see exactly what I’m getting a photograph of.
The down side, if it is a downside of these, the benefits and field capture are immense, but you also require things. You require some image processing software, why do you need that? The beauty of these cameras is you can recover detail in the shadows, dull highlights and do things like segmentation just isolate particular colours. That’s an involved thing but it can be very important sometimes. So you would need a software like Lightroom or Capture One. It also requires some sort of stitching software, there’s plenty of those about. The good news is none of these are expensive anymore, most of them are on monthly subscription, Lightroom is about 25, Capture One is about 25. The stitching software, the subscription or online things you can do, I wouldn’t recommend them.
But things like PTGui and stuff is sort of like the godfather of stitching and you can sort out pretty well any problem with PTGui. That’s several hundred pounds, but it’s worth its weight in gold because you’re going to get good quality imagery. And then you also need something to cope with what we call batch processing. You’re going to have thousands of photographs that you may want processed during the year, or even just for one job. I’ve got one school that I’m doing at the moment, and one paper mill that I’ve just done that was over 500 spherical 360 imagery. And I needed to tweak images on those. So, having batch processing is critically important, but the good news is that batch processing is facilitated by Lightroom and Capture One and PTGui as well.
So, which camera would I use? I’ve always got two. I’ve got a standard one shot which I use for infill and I use a Sony A7R4 because that allows me to go to the nth degree, or not, depending on what I need. However, it really depends on the type of work you’re doing. If you want to give a 360 camera to the surveyor that’s going out to look at a house or something, you don’t need this expensive camera. But if I was documenting a power station or a factory or a school, I’m probably more inclined to use one of these. The other one that we should mention is the Matterport type cameras, where you combine camera and Lidar.
Matterport has been given a lot of prominence, almost to the point where people say oh, I want the Matterport. Which is brilliant, I love the cameras. If I’m selling a property, they’re great, but there are some problems with them and there is a life beyond Matterport. There are other competitive cameras to Matterport, but there’s some things that you need to think about if you’re using a Matterport type camera. If you’ve got one that’s not a problem, you can use them. It’s just if you’re buying something else in the future, something to reflect on. The Lidar combined with the camera produces what we might call a low grade point cloud. It’s not bad, but it’s not survey grade.
It’s not going to give you accuracy down to a centimetre, but in many cases do you need it? That’s another question. It also provides you with a flow from the point cloud to produce a 3D dimensional model, or you can actually use it to trace and get 2D drawings where you don’t have them. Now, hopefully you’ve got them, but in many, many cases, 8%% of the world’s building stock was pre Revit. And there may be old drawings if they’re available and they’ve not disappeared, but if I’ve got to reconstruct 2D drawings so I can position my 360 imagery, it’s a great way of doing it. The problem is that the camera struggles to cope with dynamic range and has a limited resolution range.
Now, what do I mean by that? Well, it’s great up to a few metres, but if I want to do something like a sports hall or something like that it’s going to degrade quite a lot. So, it’s great if I’m doing a small building, small rooms and things like that, but when it gets to big spaces it struggles with that. And it certainly struggles with trying to stitch things if it’s outside when the wind is blowing. It’s also quite an expensive solution if I want to host for long term assets. It’s great for short term, if I want to sell a property and I need to have a 360 picture available to lots of people for a short period of time, it’s perfect.
But not necessarily if I’ve got a long term PFI contract or even just facilities management, I’m not looking at something that I’m going to have to keep paying month after month after month for. The advantage of the previous two types of camera is you can control the copyright. And the problem that you’ve got with Matterport and some of the other things is all of the images on the models are processed using the software as a service. So i many case, as soon as you press a Matterport button or upload it, you become almost like an employee of Matterport. You have to get permission, or they charge you for doing that.
Now that’s one problem, but the other problem is more fundamental with some clients and that’s to do with where these things are hosted, to do with governance and jurisdiction. Where is this data hosted? Is it in a place that I can sue people if data goes down or if it’s transferred, or the owner of that data centre changes? And there’s also issues to do with copyright and intellectual property issues. One interesting point about copyright is that as soon as you or your employee presses that shutter on that camera on the previous two types, you own the copyright, you’re not giving it away.
So, the benefits of easy software as a service thing, 360 processing, remote processing, can be immense. But you have to remember that you may not necessarily own the copyright of those things. And that might be important to your client. For example, I’m doing a factory, the client may necessarily not want that to be shared anywhere because of intellectual property, special machinery that they’ve got and things like that. So there’s the camera, and I’m just going to move on to a few field tips. Because for me the biggest issue is how can I make this as cost effective and efficient as possible? And there’s two aspects to this. There’s what you do in the field with the camera, and then probably the more interesting and the more costly part of it is what you do with those images once you’ve got them.
So, a couple of things to reflect on. Tips, things about camera placement. I’m a bit of a lazy guy, I want to do the least amount of work to get the most amount of coverage. So actually using a 360 is quite a bit of an art. What you want to do is the less photographs as possible, but with the maximum coverage. So, what you get then and you’ll find this as soon as you start doing 360 it will convert into your life, you’ll be sitting at tables in restaurants going can I see every surface from here. It’s a bit like in a spy thriller so you can get the view. You need to plan what your route is going to be and a five minute walk around on a site, on a building before you do it saves you loads of problems later on.
I walk round and sometimes I’ve got a piece of chalk and I go right, this is the best place where I can see every surface I need to. Things that are hidden behind pipework or a cabinet or things like that, which may be really important for asset management. So you become a bit of an artist and a bit of a line of sight expert really. If you’re a land surveyor, you’ve already got that inbuilt because that’s what you do. But if you’re doing 360 you become an expert on the minimum number of points of photographs that you have to take to cover the maximum number of surfaces. So spend a little bit of time walking around with a piece of chalk and X marks the spot.
Tripods and monopods really are non-negotiable, really because once you use the static imagery you’re working in low light you’re not going to be able to hold the camera steady enough in your hand so it’s not going to be blurry. Now, the good news is there’s a wide variety of things that you use, in the training course that we do we go through a whole series of these. In can be something really simple like an extendable thing, or it could be a proper camera tripod depending on what it is and how strong your muscles are. But you’re going to need a tripod or a monopod and that’s just non-negotiable, because otherwise you’re going to produce photographs that you’re going to be really disappointed in.
Releases and remote releases and stuff, one of the things that you’ll find is that you don’t want to press the shutter and a lot of people will know about this, if you can’t hold a camera in your hand if the exposure in a dark area is going to be more than about a 60th of a second. So, what you can do is you use mobile phone apps so that you can walk around the corner and trigger it, or you can hard cable it. I always use a hard cable because I always find that the mobile phone apps crunch. As soon as you start collecting mobile phones to remote 350 cameras, every time someone has a data surge you would seem to be thrown off. So, in some cases, you’re constantly having to reconnect. I try and use a cable release, but then I’m using a multi-shot camera in most cases.
Probably the biggest tip that I would suggest is you need a pocket full of door wedges. OK, before everybody says that you’re not allowed to wedge open fire doors, I get that, but there’s lots of doors where you’ve got to get an overlap and shoot through. And sometimes putting a camera in the doorway is the best way to help navigation. So, with a caveat of please don’t put door wedges under fire doors that can’t remain open, the door wedges in your pocket is a really useful, banal piece of kit. I’d also say a piece of chalk or a marker that you can put on the floor, just so that you know you’ve got coverage. So, if you have to come back to a photograph you now where you’ve got it.Obviously chalk, don’t put permanent markers on there because people get very upset with that.
And then the last thing to do is operator removal. Now, for me it’s not a frustration, it’s just that there are ways to get you out of the camera shot. So I’ve got a 360 camera image, I press the shutter release. Now, you can put a time delay on of 5-10 seconds to give you time to go and hide behind a corner so that you’re not in it, but that’s incredibly slow. So there are ways that you can mitigate that. One of the ways of doing it, and we can talk about this in more detail and for anyone that’s interested there’s probably a 20-30 minute crash course in to cover it. But by doubling the number of images, so taking one when you’re on one side and one when you’re on the other.
There are some simple scripts and simple methods which will mean that you just join the two sides of the image that you are not in. Now, if you’re using multiple image stuff then you’re always behind so the operator removal issue doesn’t arise. Trust me, that saves an awful lot of time because that can just keep click and move the camera. I don’t have to click, run away, hide and come back. In my estimation it at least doubles or trebles the number of images that you can do in a day if you go down one of these routes and I’m happy to sit and talk about that until the cows come home. Because it’s one of those annoying things that I see people doing all of the time and I go well, why are you doing that?
So, field tips we’ll look at, but there’s some more things that we need to think about as well. This is sort of divided into two bits really. The first bit is to do with field capture cameras etc etc, but then the problem and the real challenge, and this is the reason why an awful lot of cameras are bought and then discarded. It’s because people don’t know what to do with the images when they’ve got them. How do they organise these? How do they share them? Well, obviously there’s things in asset management, softwares and stuff like Active Plan, which are built around 360. But what do I do if I’m not using that and how can I share these things?
Well, the key thing to think about is what you do in the field to help you with the image organisation. So, what you’re trying to do is figure out where is that photograph taken so that I can place it? Which part of the plant room? Which deck of the ship? Which floor, which room, which flat? So, note taking can be a bit of a chore, but there’s a few things that you can do to speed that up. First of is a simple whiteboard. I’ve got a little whiteboard, it’s about 200 mil by about 300 mil, I can write on it, I can say where I am and put that on the floor by the tripod, I can mask that out later on. It means I’ve got a simple way of in the mage of figuring out what it is.
But the problem with that is I’ve got to open the image to figure out where I am.Which door am I outside of? Whereabouts in the plant room? Wouldn’t it be a better idea if you didn’t have to open the image at all? Well, that’s what I spend a lot of time trying to figure out. So, there’s a number of ways that you can do that and the most important one that I use is in my phone I’ve got a dictation machine. And the interesting thing about the dictation app is that it’s timestamped. So, I can have a look at the timestamp and if that is synced with the timestamp in my camera, I know when I’ve taken a not which image that refers to. This will save you hours and hours and hours of time. Trust me, it’s a fundamental thing that I do when I’m doing big 360 projects.
The second bit is if you’re doing that you’ve got to come up with some basic image organisation like naming conventions. There’s no point calling it AWR JPEG2345, that’s meaningless. What you can do later on is you can hack or you can actually rename those files in some of the image processing software. Or if you’re tethered, you can rename it on the fly. And you can tether it to your mobile phone or your iPad, there’s all sorts of interesting ways of doing it. But you’ve got to come up with some naming convention that helps make sense, what floor is it, what space is it? Whatever the convention is. Whether it relates to your BIM model, whether that relates to some other naming convention that your client has, classroom number, ward number etc.
If you do that and then you use that with the dictation, you’ll find that you can get through and sort your images much more quickly. But the other thing that you can do as well is you can use what we call culling tools. There are a number of tools that are designed really for professional photographers, but I’ve figured out some hacks for these. So if I’m a wedding photographer and I’ve got hundreds of photographs, I also want to categorise them into the groom, the bride, the bridesmaids, mother in law, whatever. All of the image editing software we’ve mentioned allow you to apply that sort of naming convention as either a name or as a tag, or as a group.
So what I do is I’ve hacked the wedding photography tools, they’ve taken thousands of photographs. If I’m taking photographs of products for an e-commerce site, I have to be able to sort those. So, all I’m doing is hacking those types of tools, applying conventions, meta tagging, grouping to those. The key for us really is to talk about this wonderful subject called metadata. Metadata allows us to search what I call unstructured information. So the conventional way that we look at managing images is to put them into different projects and folders and files, And that’s great, but it’s really slow because if we’re trying to find something we’re basically limited by the name the person who created that folder called it.
The beauty of metadata is that we can apply lots of different labels to the same thing. The analogy that I use is that I go fly fishing and I’ve just bought a book on fly fishing in North Wales. So, if I was to categorise that and put it into my folder, my conventional folder or let’s say my library, where would I put it? Would I put in a folder on hobbies? A folder on fly fishing? Would I put it on a folder of North Wales? The beauty of metadata is I can put a copy or a virtual copy, into all of those areas. So that means that I’m able to find things. Now, this becomes really important because 360 imagery, the other thing that I call it is knowledgement. My website is called knowledgement because that’s essentially what we’re doing, we’re managing the knowledge. And we’re managing the knowledge in these 360 imagery.
And to do that we need to have some certain procedures like, for example, the number one thing is developing a taxonomy. How do we categorise these? If I’ve got a room, if it’s too do with fire equipment what sort of fire damper is it? What sort of fire extinguisher might it be? What sort of fire alarm? So I need to come up with taxonomies and taxonomies can also mean, different people call different things in different countries. A taxonomy allows us to use synonyms and misspellings and things to help us fid us. And that allows us to develop a tagging classification ontology which means that things…we can tag things, or in 360 we may have 20 different assets, but we can’t just apply one tag to that.
The beauty of meta tagging is that we can apply as many as we want. And all of these bring me to my favourite word at the moment which is findability. How do we find stuff? You may have thousands and thousands of photographs on your hard drives, separated across your organisation, and these are really valuable. I may want to go back and say where’s the photograph of that thing before we fixed it? And because we’ve got new photographs we need to compare it. How do I find that? The interesting thing about your organisation and if you want to make your boss look good, and this isn’t me saying this, this is big consultancy companies like Gartner and McKinsey.
They say that in any knowledge based organisation, at least 25% of the daily hours are spent looking for information. So, metadata allows you to cut that time down. Now, if you went to any CFO or CEO and say we’re wasting 25% of our productivity trying to find stuff, and incidentally one in four times you won’t find it. If you went to your CFO and CEO and said look, we’re wasting all of this time they’re just going to hand you their chequebook. Because this is crucial to productivity in your organisation. productivity in the UK, productivity in the health service, whatever organisation.
GEORGE STEVENSON I’m just concerned that some people might start dropping off because we’re coming up to the hour. I just want to make sure that people are aware that we’ve got two follow up sessions next week. On Thursday at 9.30 and on Friday at 9.30 where we can look at what Barry is saying here, the practical implementation of this. So, having gone through this brilliant overview, if you want to come along and get together either on Thursday or Friday, put ‘Thursday’ or ‘Friday’ in the chat now.
BARRY BASSNETT For me, 360 imagery, there are two aspects to it, and I sort of specialise in two ends. One is the image quality, how do you get the best, but also findability. How do you make these images so that you can use them? Because you may have great quality images, but if you can’t find the right image it’s pointless taking it. So, jumping on, how do we get these images into your system? How do you get it into your Excel spreadsheets? Well, there are a number of routes to it and depending on what you want to do. But there are key things that you can use.
So, geotagging, if I take photographs outside you may or may not know that all of the photographs that you take are geotagged. Whether it’s an Apple or an Android, you can add that to your photograph in what we call Exif data. So every photograph you take, and this is how the magic of Apple and Google phones work, is you suddenly get a collection of all of the photographs when you went to get fish & chips in Scarborough, suddenly they’re all grouped together. That’s because we’re using a thing called geotagging. Now, that’s great because it works where you’ve got a satellite signal, so you can use GNSS or GPS if you want to call it that. That’s great, but what do I do about doing it inside where I’ve got no satellite coverage? How do I locate all of these images?
The good news is that you can do that. You could do it manually, but there are now systems that will allow you to do that automatically. That’s a big subject, but trust me, it’s entirely possible for you to automate these things. Because you can use photogrammetric software to calculate what we call camera poses. A camera pose is where is this in X, Y and Z, and also what we call pitch roll and Yaw (phi, beta, kappa). So we can actually orientate the image and say where is it in a coordinate system, whether that’s a national grid ordinance type survey coordinates system or whether it’s the coordinates system that you’re using for your Revit model, or whatever.
You can do that and you can automatically position, so one click and it will lay out all of those images for you in the exact position where you’re going to do. So that’s one way of doing it. Or you could do it the old fashioned way, or you could build your own 3D tour, there’s lots of different ways of doing it. The point is that you can do it, don’t let that scare you. Because one of the things that people say is I’ve got a thousand images of this paper mill, how do I populate it? Well, you can do it manually and to be honest it’s a pain in the derrière to do that. The benefits will probably work it out, but you’ve got to have some subject matter expertise.
And it’s really difficult for people who didn’t do the photographs to actually do that back in the office. That’s one of the tips that I would say, don’t have a field crew who don’t populate these, otherwise you’re just going to spend most of the time with images and no one knows where they are and they’re next to useless. And really what I wanted to do before we go into the Q&A bit is talk about what do we do next with this stuff. Because the applications for 360 imagery are just mental. We’re talking about it in asset management and in that course we could say it’s digital asset capture. We’re starting from scratch, we have no information about this building.
It might be that we’ve got no handover documentation, it might be just because of it’s age, all sorts of things. How do we build up a digital asset capture strategy? Well, 360 imagery is a really good way of doing it. It’s cost effective, it’s immediate, it doesn’t require much in the way of IT head scratching, it’s really straightforward. Then we’ve got things like what we call asset validation. So, we’re checking off things against what’s been installed. The BIM model, the designer, the architect, the MEP, people might be saying what really went in. We’re not using it for clash detection for say Lidar scanning or conventional site documentation would be for new build. It’s just a record of what has gone on that anyone can use.
We can also use it with different camera systems to do conditioned surveys. I’ll show you in a second a brief example of the level of detail that you can get with these. But if I want to look at dilapidation, if I want to look at handover for leases, if I want to look at remediation, if I want to look at facilities management, condition surveys are the be all and end all. And the beauty of 360 is it covers every surface and it’s non-negotiable, that is what you’ve got. If I’m looking at paying an invoice and I want to query that invoice, I’ve got a photograph to say well, you didn’t fill that crack that we asked you to, how much time does that save?
So, you can use everything like digital asset assessment, whether that’s part of a maintenance plan, whether that’s part of a procurement, commercial, PFI delivery, all sorts of different things. One of the other interesting aspects that you can talk about is the O&M manuals. Building 360 imagery into this is a much simpler way than typing reams and reams of documents that hardly anyone understands anyway. But the beauty of these is that you can connect these assets to manuals, to product descriptions, to all sorts of different things that you want to. Because the 360 model is like a knowledge portal. You can navigate round it and attach information to the photograph.
So you can link manuals, drawings, certifications, inspections, invoices, even emails. And interestingly you can link all of these to, for example, SharePoint. If your organisation uses SharePoint you can link from the 360 imagery to documents and search using the meta searching engine that SharePoint has. You can use the same taxonomy, by the way, but that’s another story. There are other things to do with specific applications like say fire risk assessments, because one of the things now is that many people, councils are responsible for people’s personal evacuation. Because if you’ve got somebody with limited mobility on one of your properties, then that person might need a specific evacuation procedure. Where do they go?
So, you can use it to help plan those, communicate with the people, all sorts of different things. There’s a massive, massive application for 360 in health & safety in terms of looking at risk assessment, looking at everything. And one of the key things is looking at railway access points. Most of the accidents that happen on the railway happen at access points. On the rail, not necessarily, you have two types of accidents, you trip or your hit by a train. But a lot of the injuries happen at, people need to navigate, what’s this access point look like? Has it got stairs? Can I take my tools and people down there? But it applies right across the construction sector and right across the facilities management sector too.
One of the areas that I’m particularly interested in is two things now which are sort of linked in many ways. I’m using this 360 imagery for mapping disability access. Whatever limitations I might have, if I’m a wheelchair user can I get around this university campus? And interestingly enough, there’s another one that’s come up which is to do with neural diversity. Some people need quite routes to get to and from the railway station or the shops and things like that, so one of the things that you can use 360 imagery for is that and then share it. Because the beauty of this is you can put it on to a website, you can make it available to everyone, you don’t have big point clouds and things like that to deal with.
The other thing that’s coming up is to do with the incoming, what’s probably going to be a massive impact for us, is Martyn’s Law. The regulations that have come out of the Manchester bombing. Martyn’s Law has royal ascent, but it’s going to take a bit of time to recruit the team to do it. But basically, every venue over 800 people now has to have a documentation and training for its stewards and staff in what happens in the case of a terrorist attack. This isn’t an option, this isn’t a would like. It’s a would like if you have an audience of less than 800, but anything like a football stadium or a church, any event which has more than 800 people have to, when people are assessing it.
At the moment it’s law and the law says we’re are going to set up this regulatory authority to do this. It’s probably sometime late this year, next year, every venue is going to have to comply with this. And 360 is one way of doing it. And then the thing that I’ve been doing a lot is actually the ultimate asset management. I call this DIM, decommissioning information management rather than BIM. Because we have a process in nuclear decommissioning called characterisation which means that every single object that’s in a nuclear plant is going to be commissioned needs to have a waste disposal protocol. Can I just throw it in the bin? Or do I have to bury it in a cave for half a million years? So, it’s the ultimate tool in asset management because you’ve got to do an audit of every single point.
And the best way that we’ve found of doing it is not drawings, it’s not an Excel spreadsheet, it’s 360 imagery linked to a database. Like Active Plan or any of the other 360 tools that are out there. Those are applications, and we’re going to run a couple of extra application workshops next week for an hour, just to talk about how you can do this because this is such a big topic. And to be honest it’s crucial, because 360 images are lovely to look at, but you can use them for so many different things. We’re running these next Thursday and Friday 9.30-10.30.
Just one last thing, from next Friday I am going to be starting what I call 360 bootcamps. So, if you want to get in touch with me, email me at barry@therichpixel.com I’ll send you some information about those. OK, going back to questions, I’ll have a look in the chat and see what questions you’ve got. Dan Hoogeveen, 360 imagery replaces human inspection, almost always doesn’t get in close-up enough for most types of inspection. Sorry Dan, no, that’s not right. I can get down to .1 of a millimetre.
GEORGE STEVENSON Barry, you did promise that you were going to show something, it would be really good if you’ve got an example.
BARRY BASSNETT OK, let me share my screen again. I’ll show you an example of when we’re talking about that you can’t get close enough, it’s probably opportune to that question actually. So, when people say that you can’t get good quality out of these images, this is my local church. We can navigate round with 360. This is done with a multi-shot camera, and if I zoom in here. If I go to something like this and zoom in and zoom out, you can get good enough. If you’ve picked the right camera, you can use it for inspection. The other thing I’d point out as well is what we’re coping with here is all of this area here was in shade.
With the cameras that I use you can peer into the shadows, because this isn’t very well lit. The only light really is coming from the stained-glass windows. But what I’ve got is a complete way of navigating and sharing this. The level of detail that you can get in here, when people say that you can’t get detail from 360 it’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. So that’s the sort of level of detail that we can get and imagine if you could do that, you don’t have to do that all of the time, but with the right camera and the right application you can. I don’t think there were many questions, it’s mostly people agreeing and then saying Thursday or Friday.
BRIAN McKENNA Barry, can you share a copy of that presentation? It's brilliant.
BARRY BASSNETT Yeah, we’re just starting on the subject and this is just to get you over a bit of a hump.
GEORGE STEVENSON OK, here’s a couple of practical examples and we can go into these in a bit more detail. This particular application, what we’re using it for is to check that the drawings that are in the secure information box, which is what the fire brigade use, are actually correct. Now, what the 360 photo here has done, it’s actually revealed that there’s a gap there, a doorway there, that isn’t on the secure information box drawings. Now that’s really, really dangerous for the fire service and they want that sorting out because it really isn’t satisfactory. And part of the reason is that the drawings themselves, there’s not clarity, there’s all of these styles of drawings in there and none of them are quite right.
What we’re also doing is we’re putting behind the 360 photos a master library of asset types. So by having a master library of asset types it means that you’ve got a controlled set of information which then can be connected to lots of other things. So rather than just putting a tag on the 360 photo, what you’re actually doing is you’re connecting it to a master database which is interconnected with maintenance information, product information and all of the rest of it. And you’ll see here, what we’ve done with this is we’ve created it so that we’ve got Uniclass, IFC, we can add NRM. What we’re trying to do is encourage people to use standardised data sets.
The 360 then can then be tagged with the asset types that are in that library. So here, we’re identifying where there’s an AOV and also where there’s an actuator. And that’s not being tagged in the 360 photo, it’s actually being tagged in the database, so all of those assets are now related to that space. So you can pick up where the dry risers are, for example, and also what’s in an electrical cupboard. So this information is in the database so you can then go to the database as a schedule, click on it and it remembers where that particular asset was in the building. So, that comes back to Barry’s findability thing.
This one here is integration with OpenSpace which is one of the leading applications that are used by the construction teams. And what it’s doing, it’s recording exactly what’s there. So then the asset teams are then using that to then verify what has been provided. And again, on the right hand side there we’ve got the validation of what’s in the room and then you can go and check it and it’s updating that. And in this example, it’s the findability is being used to find the fire dampers. So the fire dampers there, we’ve got the 3D model, but we actually want to see where that fire damper is, what the product is. In this case it’s connected back to a product library.
And the product library also has the information about maintenance, so that means that it’s only collected the once. And it can also generate a very simple maintenance view of that item and then be able to connect that back to the 360 photo. So here, that’s connecting it directly back to the 360 photo, and therefore you can also tie that back to the manufacturer’s product information. Including any documents about that item. So, rather than having to just have those in the O&M manual, they’re actually connected to the asset as well. So again, it makes findability much easier.
BRIAN McKENNA Just one quick question on this, it relates to what Barry said about automated positioning or photographs. Using that technology, could you potentially auto generate this? Once you’ve set up your taxonomy and your software, could you autogenerate this tagging within the system?
GEORGE STEVENSON That’s what we’re working towards, Brian. We’ve now done 140,000 asset types, or assets. That’s quite a lot in a Large Language Model, but it’s not quite enough yet to do that automatically, but it’s semi-automatic, it will be.
BARRT BASSNETT Just to say this, there are things that I’ve been working on to do with AI identification of defects and crack propagation, for example, where we’re using this in some nuclear applications to see how cracks are moving. So, the AI thing is changing the game. I hate the word game changer, but it is, because it’s going to make an awful lot of things much simpler. The key thing though is you’ve got to take photographs of it, otherwise it can’t work by itself. It needs some sort of images to generate that. And if you’re going to do that you need the best quality images that you’re going to get, so that the Ai doesn’t give you lots of false positives. And identifying things that are not right, because the whole point of it is it will do a lot of automated tasks, but you still don’t want to have any manual intervention.
So, understanding how you can take good quality photographs that are appropriate to the asset. There’s no point taking photographs if you’re doing little bits of pipework because you need to get in a bit closer to see it, otherwise it just looks like spaghetti. So, it’s more to do with the quality of the image that you take and understanding that is going to be critical to the success of those things.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think absolutely, and the other thing, Brian, is the reason we’re being able to do what we’re doing is that we’re using libraries. So because we’re using database libraries it means that you can get that repeatability that you need. My development team tell me that you need at least a hundred images of a particular asset that had been captured and recognised by an expert to say that it’s one of those, for every single asset type. And in our library we’ve got about 3,500 asset types that we can work with.
This is just the one final thing, this is showing how the drawings, for example, you can prepare a spatial model from existing O&Ms. So this is working on the basis of, that’s the drawings of the compartment walls, you’ve then got the schedules of the doors. So we can then combine the two things together in the database and therefore we’ve then got a plan view that has got the 60-minute walls, the 120-minute walls. We’ve then got the doors that are protecting them and then we’ve got the 360s that have been dropped in.
So in this case in this nursing home, the assets are tagged but also you can then use that to do the condition assessment. So again, that comes back again to the quality of the image, but what it can do is substantially speed up the process. And in this particular case we’ve been working with the HSE so that we can then make that, so it’s also tagging back to the Uniclass risk matrix. So, those are just some use cases that we can talk about.
And we’ve got quite a few more that we can talk about on Thursday or Friday. And if you can come along to the meeting with maybe some examples of things that you’re doing, or just ideas as to the art of the possible. I think being able to have a 360 fire risk assessment, for example, has got a lot of potential, because fire risk assessments aren’t necessarily that easy to understand after they’ve been handed over. Whereas combining that with 360s probably would be helpful.
BARRY BASSNETT I think that what George has shown is sort of like the elegant solutions that we can apply in terms of productivity. I’d just like to point out that you can just use 360 in a really simple way as well. And sometimes that is a way of conveying information, I’ll give you on last example. And that is one water authority now is using 360 tours as part of their tender documentation. Because they’re embedding that in the tender documentation so people can get a much better view of the conditions and all sorts of things. And it means people are not having to second guess or building contingencies because they’ve not been able to do a site visit.
Two things have happened with that. The first one is that the value or the cost for the tenderee or the person doing the tender has dropped by about 25%. The second thing is the overall price has dropped by about 12% for simple/similar? 1hr 14mins 27secs contracts, because people don’t have to put the contingency factor in. They know what they’re walking into and from 360 immersive they get a much more important view. And it’s not a complicated thing, it’s just a few 360s can make all of the difference at the beginning of a project. And at the end as we’re using it in decommissioning in nuclear too.
That’s all I wanted to say, we’ve got these follow up things next Thursday and Friday. If you’re interested, I’ll be announcing these new bootcamps as well because it seems to me that there’s a big market and a big need for people to understand. Maybe not just you guys, but your colleagues in other parts of your organisation need to be made aware of what 360 imagery can deliver, cost effectively as a way of communication, clarity and stuff like that. Thank you for your time, we had 60-70 people onboard, and thank you for your kind comments in the chat.
GORDON PRINGLE You were talking about asset information potentially coming from other devices feeding into the 360. Obviously I’ve got a vested interest in that in the sense of water quality on corrosion control, or water quality and legionella management. But if you’ve got live sensors, how does that kind of apply into 360? Can we API that kind of live data and actually transact live with the system internal data?
BARRY BASSNETT Yeah, we’re talking about, people’s definition of a digital twin depends which company that you’re working for and what you’re trying to sell, I think. But there is no problem with embedding, so you can embed tags into that which is if you’ve got an Internet of Things device then you can embed a link to that and have that as a popup system. We’ve done that, in actually fact I’d have to kill you after I told you. Basically that’s what were’ doing in the nuclear field is we’ve got temperature sensors feeding in to the 360 imagery which is a live update. Providing you’ve got an IP address you can link anything to these 360 imagery. Because the beauty of it is you’re not necessarily putting it into a 3D coordinate, it’s a 2D image on a screen. And it’s just a simple URL.
GORDON PRINGLE Our devices are mildly different than that, but we can have a chat about that at some stage and actually demo that same kind of stuff.
GEORGE STEVENSON Gordon, that’s essentially what we’re doing. So, within Active Plan 360 is in the asset database with its coordinates. And because our database is SQL server it can talk with anything.
BARRY BASSNETT Just one live example that I’m working on. This sounded weird, it’s actually in schools, for monitoring levels of carbon dioxide in class rooms. Because in the afternoon they’ve realised that the carbon dioxide reduces learning capabilities, people fall asleep, they’re drowsy. So what we’re doing there is they’ve got a Revit model, so they need to look at volumes and air shift and things like that, for ventilation. But the simple way to actually design it with these 360 imagery and then click on that, and that’s where the monitors are.
So, they actually use that for maintenance of the monitors, rather than the Revit model. They can feed that information into their Revit flow models and air flow models and stuff like that so that they’ve got a live, dynamic, fluid whatever you call it. It’s way beyond my pay grade, but essentially that’s what you’re doing, a similar sort of thing to what you’re talking about, remote monitoring.
GEORGE STEVENSON If you’ve got other people you think may be interested in this, let us know and we’ll send them a link to the recording.
BARRY BASSNETT OK guys, I’ll see you next week. In the meantime if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to email me or find me on LinkedIn and I’m more than happy to share what I know.
CHAT
Dan Hoogeveen (External) 11:15 am
360 Imagery replaces human inspection" Almost always doesn't get in closeup enough for most types of inspection
Simon Newton (External) 11:21 am
Andy Cumberpatch (External) 11:34 am
Even indoors the Matterport can struggle with multiple floors. We have a Matterport Pro 3, sometimes we have to scan each floor separately so it doesn't incorrectly compress, meaning lots of issues
Simon Newton (External) 11:42 am
we are trialling openspace and oculo with insta360 cameras and Ricoh cameras. lighting and scrapes on the lens are the main issues. resolution is fine as a basic point of progressive record of our builds with more detailed part L recorded by other means.
Dan Hoogeveen (External) 11:44 am
Simon Newton We have been using Oculo for a couple of years now. I can give you couple of tips outside of this chat if you like.
Pierre Venter (External) 12:03 pm
Barry, the added-value of implications in areas that I hadn't considered is very valuable.
Charlotte Brogan (External) 12:06 pm
great for a client initially but as a repairs team then attend things may change and the imagery and tagging becomes obsolete? Therefore the statement you had on maintaining this data is very poignant.
Shafiq Haq (External) 12:13 pm
Hi Barry, thanks for the presentation and its been very informative. Please can you share the recording? Apologies I need to shoot off but I'd like to know more on how these visual capture techniques compare to other methods such as NeRFs and LiDAR reinforced 3D Gaussian Splatting
Pierre Venter (External) 12:14 pm
The scanning of bridges, using high-res cameras on drones is one area that is insanely fast, accurate and efficient. This is a very important integration in AEC+OO. Thanks Barry