Geoff Zeiss

Talking about the construction industry, the gaming industry, geo-spatial. There’s things happening in these sectors that are important. Construction industry is 40% GDP, worldwide 2-4 trillion dollars. One challenge is global warming.

71% of electricity consumption is involved in buildings. LEED certification, green building councils. 14,000 projects that are LEED certified. Carbon footprint, natural lighting, heat sinks, etc. This has really become a worldwide effort. That’s a big area.

Water company in Australia had been mandated to be carbon neutral. First step, replace headquarters.

Requires massive renovation of reconstruction of facilities.

State of infrastructure in North America. “Report Care for American Infrastructure”, every 2 years or so. 2003 roads and highways got d+, 2005 got a D.

Another example of challenges in the construction industry. Impacts a lot of people’s lives.

Bridge collapses, gas explosions, etc. People don’t like this, governments do something about it.

“Who’s going to do all this stuff” “In the US alone., an additional one million workers will be needed to address these challenges in the construction industry.”

Not enough workers to do this.

“And productivity is lagging”

Graph showing industrial productivity (non-farm) is going up, but construction productivity is going down.

“Geospatial enabling”

80% of IT can benefit from location intelligence.

“Building Information Modeling”

Good for accounting, also different subsystems can be developed by different people so makes sure they don’t encounter problems.

“3D Visualization”

Use data from when building was designed and combine with underground utility data and realistic visualisation, can really simulate entire cities.

Have many benefits

Urban reconstruction

  • Right to light
  • Noise abatement
  • View protecion
  • others…

3D visualization of underground network of a city

Allows right to light to be found, based on geo data and gaming technology. Can identify issues with shading. Good for LEED too.

Noise abatement. “Who’s going to hear a soccer game?” for example.

This is what you can do with a full simulation of an urban environment. Showing very good simulation of Seattle. Elevated freeway. If there’s an earthquake, this thing will fall down. Choosing to go underground or elevated. Contracted company to work out how much it would cost. Wanted citizen involvement but instead created 3D model videos. Showing what it would look like to remove the elevated road and put it underground.

Summary Real challenges IT developing techs convergence Enables intelligent simulation of urban environments

Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology

Technorati tags: construction, where, where2.0, where2008