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.

Prefab Redux - another look at green prefab

From the Seattle Business Magazine April issue, "Prefab Redux"

Great to revisit the topic now that the hype has withered away. Such a shame that there is still so little discussion about how the majority of high-performance homes constructed to the strict passivhaus / passive house and Swiss Minergie performance standards are prefab. Then again, the Swiss, Germans, and Austrians are years ahead in integrating applied buildings science into the design-fabricate-construct process for high-performance building and even that is not generally recognized within the North American building community so of course there is little awareness about how they achieve and scale the process.

CutMyTimber : Digital Manufacturing: Paperless from FIM model to CNC mac...

Here is a great example or integrated design and manufacturing. The video is only 12 minutes long and is a great case study for real integrated project delivery.

IDEAbuilder in Sustainable Industries magazine

The March issue of Sustainable Industries featured an article on European green building by Justin Moresco. Both Stefan and I were extensively interviewed for the article and much of the information we shared with Justin was included. You can read the article here.

IDEAbuilder at GABreport

An article on our Lake Tahoe proof-of-concept project is now online at the GABreport website. The editor, Mignon O'Young is a green architect and the editor of the GABreport - a great online resource for the green building community.

Thank you Mignon! We look forward to seeing you at West Coast Green and keeping up with you at your website and at cleantech and green building events.

IDEAbuilder at West Coast Green

We will have a booth at West Coast Green in the innovation pipeline area. Please do stop by and visit us.

We will have demos to show and will be ready to answer your questions about the future of building, 3D design, robotic fabrication, sustainability and green building in Europe, etc.

Looking forward to a great event!