COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – We here at SPAR 3D have announced that Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems, will keynote the 10th Annual SPAR International conference here this April.
His address, “Information Mobility for 3D Data: From Hand-off and Hand-over to Hands-on!,” will focus on how information mobility is breaking down the institutional barriers between design, construction and operations, while, at the same time, it is breaking down the boundaries between the physical world and virtual models.
By leveraging the consumer technology of tablets and LTE wireless communication for industrial applications, Bentley will argue, “a new and transformative convergence is possible, with beneficial outcomes to improve ROI and to help deliver high-performing, intelligent infrastructure.”
This topic mirrors talk surrounding Bentley’s recent partnership with Trimble, where the companies will team up to address customer needs for more closely coordinating virtual models with real-world project completion.
“We were seeing a convergence of our expertise in the virtual world with Trimble’s expertise in the physical world,” Bentley VP of marketing Huw Roberts said at the time. He noted that there are a lot of users taking data from their laser scanners and putting it into Bentley’s modeling tools, an ability Bentley has invested in and is actively promoting. The fact, he said, that all of that point cloud data is geo-coordinated throughout all of Bentley’s offerings was particularly grabbing Trimble customers’ attention.
Further, Greg Bentley, particularly, has been an advocate for point cloud data and its integration with design software. When Bentley bought Pointools in 2011, he announced the acquisition by saying, “Point clouds are useful in their own right. They’re not just the beginning of the information stream; they’re increasingly valuable … I believe there are uses for point clouds that aren’t anything like what we’re doing today.”
In the spring of 2012, he promised, “where we’re going with point clouds as a fundamental data type, you won’t look for specialized products to use [point clouds]. They’ll be in equal standing with geometric models” within all of Bentley’s products.
“You can’t keep up with users’ demands for point clouds,” Bentley said of customer demand at the time. “But the gating factor has been the problem that you couldn’t manage them up till now. They were too big … We’ve surmounted that, and I hope to be reporting at this time next year that you can’t find where point clouds start and leave off in our solutions.”
With the release of Descartes V8i, Bentley certainly moved in that direction, as you can see in this examination of the software’s new capabilities with point clouds and how that’s been leveraged throughout the Microstation platform.
In his talk at the upcoming SPAR conference, Bentley plans to connect all these dots, explaining how “innovations will span physical and virtual infrastructure assets, creating dynamic connections through breakthroughs like intelligent positioning and hypermodeling, in which specific locations in the physical asset are calibrated with their corresponding positions in the virtual asset and can offer hyperlinks to all relevant data for that location and instance.” The technology of 3D capture of physical environments, with advances like point-cloud streaming and point-cloud differencing, will further bridge the physical/virtual divide, he posits.
To see his full presentation, plan to join us at SPAR International, at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, April 15-18. Learn more here.
