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The first obstacle to the introduction of cloud survey is the necessary technology. Reality Capture's methods are delicate, requiring advanced algorithms to process large data flows without risk of error. Manual cross checks are often necessary and manual steps are necessary for each scan.
without automation and without the possibility of performing tasks simultaneously, the effective power of the cloud is limited. Without stable connections, the quantity of regularly captured 3D data requires a lot of the bandwidth of the network.
with the imminent 5G and advanced 4G offering access speeds regularly reaching 300 Mbps, bandwidth problems become easier to manage and more realistic download times. But investing in access and new technologies requires a greater promise of improvement than simply making remote downloads to applications that operate in a traditional way.
The market for 3D laser digitization technologies is the place where some of the most exciting advances occur. In this article, we will explore the importance of cloud solutions and the basic steps to become the 21st century BIM service provider.
Step 1: Know the cloud solutions available to you and the Sharing with your teams
The modern statement is a balance between execution speed, efficiency and quality. It is essentially a question of obtaining the right deliverable for the customer in the most profitable way. New technologies offer new opportunities. These are the diversification of your business in new areas such as BIM, as well as the possibility of responding to new calls for tenders on new markets, such as support for prefabricated manufacturing.
Many evolution opportunities, you must become aware of your favorite areas and projects, you will have to be sure of what you know how to do and what you cannot do. Are you just looking for growth? Do you want to exploit the potential equipment of equipment and the processing speed? Do you want to contact new potentially more lucrative areas? The main thing is to ensure that your objectives are understood by everyone and that they are achievable.
greater flexibility
Today you must know how to mobilize resources Important when projects are numerous while knowing when reducing these resources mobilized when these projects decrease. A Cloud approach facilitates this operation because your 3D statements will no longer need specific physical servers, positioned at specific locations, available at specific times to run.
with cloud services, you can Create then release treatment and storage environments according to your needs, it means that you can always make the most of your basic equipment and use the flexibility of the cloud to do more, experiment, prototyper and mobilize more for very large Projects.
faster deployments
Cloud computing will have a major impact on how the surveyors carry out their work. By being able to access a cloud system and a data stock, scans can be saved, downloaded and aligned directly from the construction site. The simultaneous download of many scans is much faster than grouping everything in a gigantic project file in the office, then trying to download or share it. In the same way, customers and stakeholders can have access to the same data via a cloud portal rather than write a paper report that will be distributed to these people.
once your pre-treated data are in the cloud, any additional treatment can also be undertaken thanks to the power of massive parallel treatment. Your points recording performance performance can increase considerably, especially if your recording software can take full advantage of the multithread parallel treatment (see step 2).
when taking care of new Projects, creation - and elimination - of calculation and storage resources specific to the project is a much faster process, allowing your project team to work more quickly. You can now start to create a range of environments (production, development, test) with very high specifications to organize implementations and try new approaches.
do more with less
With fewer servers to maintain and with a range of storage options at your disposal, you will find that you can spend less time worrying about equipment, servers and storage upgrades and spend more time Perform real topography work. Many companies estimate that they can reduce their maintenance time up to 50% on their existing equipment, switching to the cloud. This increased productivity means that you can finish projects faster and intervene on even more projects.
Opt for a cloud solution can also allow you to save on the cost of your hardware upgrades. To take an example, for the moment for version 7.0 of Scene, Faro recommends 8 cores, 64 GB of RAM and an SSD disc of 1 to plus an NVIDIA 1080GTX graphics card for rendering and visualization of a point cloud - a typical cost of around 10000 € per workstation. For version 5.5 in 2015, the recommended configuration was a Quad X64 and 8 GB of RAM processor. The rapid change in material needs and growing data volumes mean that you must either perpetuate your hardware investments, or risk lacking hardware resources and not upgrading your equipment.
Step 2: Invest in the right recording software compatible with the cloud
to make the most of the actual power of cloud services, you are not going to store files and data in the cloud. You will need recording software compatible with the cloud, software that can process your data automatically and generate good results without the need for office software or human intervention.
Point clouds and laser scanners are not "new" - there have been in commercial forms since the late 1990s. What changes is treatment technology. The slowest aspect of creating a point cloud has always been "recording". This is the assembly process of the many scans necessary to obtain the full point cloud of an environment. Traditional recording software required an important manual examination throughout a slow process that increased the time required to produce any point cloud. With software compatible with the cloud, we now consider a robust recording process, designed from A to Z to work in the cloud, for faster and more detailed results.
Step 3: You that your network is up to it
Treatment in the cloud can take place in the field or at the office. The network therefore plays a crucial role regardless of where the application is hosted. It is essential that the network connections you have at the office are good enough to avoid any bottleneck in data transmission. You should also examine various routings and swinging if you have not already done so.
your mobile connections will also become crucial with the imminent passage to 5G. Evaluate your mobile telephony supplier and make sure to know its network coverage, speeds and data packages. Also make sure to invest in field equipment that lives up to the task. Increasingly, this type of work can be done using tablets rather than laptops. It is also important to look at the supplier of the cloud solutions with which the software is a partner - the reliability of a big name like AWS or Microsoft Azure is often a good starting point.
Step 4: Update your processes so that they correspond
As mentioned earlier, technology is never a solution - it is a tool. If you really want to have an impact on your performance as a surveyor, you must also look at how the work is delivered: your workflows.
you should try to make some or all the following modifications:
- Make a coarse recording in the field
- Immediately return the scans recorded from the site
- Collaborate remotely using portals and visualization
- Share files safely with your customers via the Cloud
- Integrate BIM in your workflow
- Understand which "room for maneuver" These changes offer you to conquer New markets or respond to more business
Step 5: Experience
The impact of the association of new types of registration and software software automation with the power of cloud computing is enormous. The simultaneous recording of very large sets of data in the field - with little or no additional time - opens many new paths for your company.
The cloud is something new and revolutionary for Many surveyors and their companies and, because it is so new, it is understandable that the exact requirements and understanding of how they want to use the cloud will be difficult to manage.
Technology is in constant evolution. The cloud offers great flexibility and allows new effective collaboration methods, so it's time for you to acquire the basics, to opt for the cloud solution most suited to your activity, then start to experiment.
