Last month, reality capture and digital factory specialist NavVis announced a new collaboration with Siemens Smart Infrastructure. Per the announcement of the news, the collaboration with be used “to integrate accurate as-is 3D data and an immersive 3D experience to Siemens’ latest scalable building platform Building X.” The new Building X platform, which is built on the Siemens Xcelerator design principles, includes a 360-degree Viewer application, powered by NavVis’ IVION.
Siemens launched Building X in June of last year, and they describe it on their website as a “scalable digital building platform to digitalize, manage, and optimize building operations, allowing for enhanced user experience, increased performance and improved sustainability.” The platform is designed to help bridge building owners and operators into the new smart building ecosystem, providing a single source of truth to make workflows more efficient.
It includes a series of modular applications for specific use cases – including the aforementioned 360-degree Viewer, as well as energy and security management systems, fire safety applications, and more. As noted, the platform is an extension of the Siemens Xcelerator (hence the “X” in Building X), which helped land Siemens on Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies early this year.
This kind of software is crucial to unlocking the new digital solutions which can enable smarter decisions throughout a building’s lifecycle, but to truly maximize these solutions it’s important to get accurate representations of the real world. This is NavVis’ speciality, particularly with their wearable mobile reality capture solutions, like the VLX 3. We’ve seen them continue to carve out their key role in these workflows, having also partnered with NVIDIA and their Omniverse platform, as well as with Mercedes-Benz to create digital twins of their factories. Alongside that hardware, too, NavVis offers the NavVis IVION platform on the software side to create digital twins with the reality capture data.
This collaboration is further indication that we are no longer in a place in which this kind of operational digital twin work is theoretical, and moving towards this future being the norm. We’ve already mentioned NVIDIA’s Omniverse, which is helping to push this reality to the forefront, and Siemens is right there with them with their Xcelerator. There are plenty of reasons this shift is happening, including the improvements and increased accessibility in the reality capture space, where NavVis is headlining the move towards these operational digital twins. Software has also improved, as have cloud capabilities which allow these tools to be shared, at least in part, via simple web links to enable more collaboration.
“Having NavVis as a partner and benefiting from their unique mobile mapping and laser scanning as part of Building X allows us to reimagine work and drive value,” Rahul Chillar, Senior Vice President of Digital Buildings at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Building Products, noted in a press statement.
“We are excited to enable the Siemens Building X open platform with NavVis technology. We firmly believe that accurate as-is 3D data at scale and immersive interaction with this data is critically important to make the vision of smart buildings a reality,” added Dr. Felix Reinshagen, CEO and Co-Founder at NavVis.
