In the last several posts, we examined how Reality Computing turns things into data (capture), data into things (create), and what goes on in between (compute). Now let’s look at how businesses and organizations can benefit from Reality Computing.
The Value of Reality Computing
Knowledge
Reality Computing allows analyses and simulations to be performed digitally rather than on the actual object or system. Industrial designers use 3D-printed components to test a product’s form, usability, and ergonomics. Engineers use models derived from scanned buildings to perform energy analyses and determine a facility’s carbon footprint. Civil engineers create cinematic-quality project animations to support project approval and public outreach efforts for large (sometimes contentious) infrastructure projects.
Reality Computing enables engineers to use digital project models
derived from scanned buildings to perform energy analyses.
Change
The comparison of reality-captured data over time can yield important information about progress, deterioration, or movement. Reality Computing helps teams monitor construction progress to evaluate subcontractor productivity and quality, measure changes of a building’s critical structural supports while a tunnel is bored below it, or identify a new object on an airfield that may pose a security risk.
Location
Reality Computing enables processes to be accomplished digitally (and remotely) that otherwise would have to be accomplished in the physical presence of the site or object. For example, a team of construction experts in Chicago, working on a high-rise project being built in Singapore, study scanned data of a building’s structural system to assess crane placement—without having to fly to the construction site. Researchers, curators, educators, and the general public use web-based interactive tools to digitally view, study, interact, and manipulate objects from museum collections—without having to physically see them or touch them.
Specificity
By recreating and accommodating physical real-world conditions, Reality Computing is helping designers move directly from a digital model to a finished physical object via custom fabrication and construction processes. Examples include creating brackets to precisely position a curtain wall system on a less precise structural frame, or 3D printing a perfectly fitting dress or jacket.
“For more than a century, modern manufacturing has been defined by the maxim that complexity and uniqueness are expensive; in other words, it’s cheaper to produce a large volume of the same thing at a lower unit price. But digital realization is beginning to break that industry touchstone. Digital fabrication, 3D printing, and related technologies are enabling designers to move directly from a digital model to a finished physical object. As a result, complexity and uniqueness have become cheap and manufacturing is being democratized.”
— Construction Executive, September 2013
Digital Dreaming by Dominic Thasarathar
Fidelity
Reality Computing can replace complicated, failure-prone adjustments to fit an object to an exact physical condition. Reality Computing allows designers to accurately reflect the physical world (existing or as-built conditions) in their design model for coordination and manufacturing/construction planning. For example, ‘driving’ a virtual model of a new car body through the digital point cloud of an existing automotive assembly line to verify production; or scanning and importing the existing abutments that will support a replacement bridge.
What are some examples of how Reality Computing is being used today? Check out our next post to find out!
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