Augmented Reality and the building industry - Video from the AR Event last week

I gave a 15 minute presentation at the Augmented Reality Event in San Jose on AR in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Despite speaking very rapidly and rushing through a deck of slides I was only able to initiate a conversation about emerging technologies and how they could impact a $5.6 trillion industy.

Below is a four minute video showing an example of some of the innovative research and technology under development.

D4AR - 4 dimensional augmented reality - Modeling from RAAMAC Lab on Vimeo.

This project is led by Mani Golparvar-Fard at Virginia Tech, Feniosky Pena-Mora at Columbia University, and Silvio Savarese at the University of Michigan. More information available here.

Charles Woodward from Finland's VTT also presented very compelling AR research and technology demos at the event. More information on his research here. A 10-page PDF with more info here.

Look for more AEC-related augmented reality innovation at the upcoming ISMAR conference in Basel, Switzerland October 26-29th and at the 11th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality (CONVR), in Weimar, Germany on November 3-4th.

Push Pop Press - Al Gore's "Our Choice"

Great interactive content.

Al Gore's Our Choice from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

2011 World of Modular Presentations now available

Interesting reports available at this link.

I look forward to the publication of the McGraw Hill SmartMarket Report on fabrication and modularization. Lots of great info in the 60 page PDF at the previous link. The McGraw-Hill staff told me the full report iwill be released this month.

UPDATE: The full report is now available (free) at this link.

Performance Building Institute

I just discovered the great research on Mark Sand's Performance Building Institute website. I highly recommend it as a resource for "applied BIM" and fully integrated construction.

Onebuild - New Prefab Company in Oregon

Dale Sperling, formerly of UNICO properties, is profiled in today's Seattle Times. He purchased the assets of bankrupt Transform - "for 15 cents on the dollar" - of Bellingham and Mount Vernon, Washington and moved the CNC lines to Klamath Falls, Oregon. The company website is now up and Dale stated in the article that the first sale is expected by the end of May. More coverage here from the Daily Journal of Commerce.


Great to see another prefab entrepreneur in the Pacific Northwest promoting fabrication. I very much look forward to their success - we would like to purchase wall panels from them when they are ready.