At SPAR 3D Expo and Conference 2016, DotProduct announced a collaboration to bring automatic feature recognition and modeling onboard their portable, handheld 3D scanners. This upgrade comes in the form of Elysium’s InfiPoints software, which will be embedded directly into DotProduct’s DPI-8 to provide the modeling of planes and pipes from point-cloud data.
For more information about the desktop version of Elysium’s InfiPoints software, see SPAR 3D’s coverage:
We caught up with the two companies for more details about what users can expect from their collaboration.
“What we really want to introduce here is the world where everything is done on the tablet and on site,” said Shun Higashide, global business with Elysium. “This integration will change how people will handle point clouds and how they will process point clouds in their workflows.”
How so? Higashide says it will speed up the scanning workflow by enabling users to QA their scan on site. This means they can ensure that the data they have captured meets the needs of the overall project—all while still in the field.
As an example, he explained how the DPI-8/InfiPoints combination could be used to improve the plant and facility BIM workflow: ”When they scan equipment in a plant or a facility and they have to put that in the BIM software in later phases, what we intend to do is extract the geometries inside of the DPI-8 so they can get the rough model of the data that they are going to use for the BIM software.”
After extracting this “rough model,” users will have a good sense for the quality of the data they are going to plug into their BIM workflow. A certain area not looking as detailed as you had hoped? You’re still in the field, so you can easily go and capture it again. “In that way,” Higashide says, I think in the long term it will reduce the workload and simplify the scanning workflow.”
DotProduct marketing manager Chris Ahern says this combination has the added benefit of making the DPI-8 easier to use for those who are new to 3D technologies. This is because the extracted geometries will be easier to understand and use than raw point clouds.
“A lot of people say, well, a point cloud is nice, but what I really want is to pull a lightweight surface-based file, not just a collection of millions of points,” Ahern explains. “ “Whether it’s a matter of the limitations of which programs work with point clouds and which don’t, or if it’s a matter of having something that’s easier to use as a starting point in a modeling environment, that’s where something like this partnership comes into play.”
The biggest benefit, he adds, is that this isn’t “another program that you can be using on your desktop to post-process the data and do all these tweaks.” With the forthcoming Phi.3D update, he says that “there is a new option to send to InfiPoints on the tablet.”
DotProduct’s release of the new version of Phi.3D is slated for next week, and Elysium plans to debut the tablet version of their InfiPoints software at Intergeo in October.
