Founders of Leap Motion: Our Amazing 3D Tracking Will Be Everywhere - Where will it be in Architecture, Engineering and Construction?

Watch this video and ponder what tens of thousands of software developers will do with Leap Motion once they get there hands on the developer kits.




For more information read the full article on the Singularity Hub website here. Take a look at the Leap Motion website, and join the discussion in the Linkedin Group Leap Motion.

McGraw Hill is hosting a conference called FutureTech in San Francisco on July 10th. Included are session on Augmented Reality and other new technologies in architecture, engineering and construction. The list of speakers is impressive, and the focus is the construction industry as is made clear in the marketing blurb below,

"You will also hear where the next wave of exciting innovations will be coming from that will continue to provide powerful benefits to early adopters and change the landscape of the construction industry forever."

And while a few hundred AEC professionals converge in San Francisco to discuss technology-meets-AEC, a few hundred developers will be too busy coding to attend. Despite all the talk about building information modeling and virtual design and construction, the information technology industry and the AEC industry still don't really trust one another and are barely on speaking terms (my opinion from spending more than 10 years in each industry). Software will eat the AEC industry, as it is almost every other industry, and with hardware/software innovation like the Leap, the potential (inevitability) for massive disruption grows daily. The vast majority in the industry will miss the opportunity because they fear change, but it will be forced upon them by consumers themselves who will use new technologies to interact with product and service vendors thereby forcing change from the demand side.

Imagine how much change will occur between the sessions at this year's conference and next year's conference. Tens of thousands of developers will be developing demos and applications using Leap Motion and a few hundred (or even thousand) will focus on computer-aided-design data, and the really forward looking ones will focus on design and computer-aided-manufacturing data, linking design and fabrication. This is where it gets really interesting. And it is the area we are focused on.

This is going to be a wild ride indeed.

Leap Motion in Architecture, Engineering and Construction

How can one use this technology in the building industry? We have a few ideas. Watch (interact with) this space.

I started a discussion on the Leap Motion Forum with this title, "Leap in the $4.8 trillion architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry" which now has more than 1,300 views. Not surprising given that in a recent announcement the Leap team stated that over 400 of the 26,000 applicants for their software development kit (SDK) indicated they intended to focus on computer-aided design (CAD) interface enhancements

For more information visit the Leap website, read this review by Wired (their video review embedded below) and join the linked in group "Leap Motion" to join in the discussion.



Using Leap for augmented reality apps in AEC has great potential. While there has already been a lot of discussion about using augmented reality in the industry, leap technology will enable any user to interactive with 3D model data intuitively. And as the interactive functionality supports an increasing amount of real-time, multi-user collaborative design, the possibilities seem almost endless.

McGraw Hill Construction is hosting a Future Tech event in San Francisco on July 10 and the 9 - 10 am session is on Digital Visualization and Augmented Reality. Ideally it will be possible to include a demonstration showing AEC content using leap motion technology at the event.

And on Leap and the Third Industrial Revolution, here is a link to the discussion on the Leap Forums. Although the AEC industry has thus far been minimally impacted by software and technology, most of the really compelling innovation is technology-based, and the greatest potential to realize vast gains in efficiency will be through industrialization, however painful and slow that process is.

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.

ITCON Issue on Using Gaming Technologies in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

The Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon)published a special issue on gaming meets AEC. Almost 600 pages with 32 articles on the building industry and virtual reality, augmented reality, training, education, collaborative design, etc.



Having just returned from a week at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I am enthused to see academic recognition of the convergence of a very innovative industry (gaming) with one of the largest, but very change-resistant, trillion dollar industries - building.