New Spin, LLC announced Monday that for the last two years it has been privately virtualizing electrical utility substations and other commercial facilities with high-definition photography, virtual tours and point-cloud models. Their 1,500 clients include Western Farmers Electrical Cooperative (WFEC) and American Electric Power (AEP). New Spin has virtualized all of WFEC’s approximately 300 substations and is in the process of virtualizing AEP’s 6,000 substations.
To date, for WFEC and AEP alone, New Spin has produced over 44,000 high-definition panoramic scenes and 150,000 still images. To accommodate the transfer, storage, web-hosting, search and viewing of this enormous amount of data, New Spin has built an integrated end-to-end pipeline culminating in a web browser application called “You Control“. You Control provides a simple, easy, secure and intuitive way to interact with virtualized assets and other client data without the need for any software outside of a web browser.
Today, thousands of users at AEP and WFEC use You Control. The ever-growing number of uses for You Control include a variety of engineering, operational, training, safety, and project-planning initiatives. At the upcoming SPAR International 2014 conference, AEP and WFEC will join New Spin on stage to share firsthand how they use the You Control platform, as well as to learn about the new features that are coming from New Spin’s technology team, who will be sharing some of the unique challenges they faced in the construction and ongoing development of this project, as well as demonstrate some of these exciting features.
US Marine & CEO of New Spin Mike Windham states, “For the last fifteen months, we have invested heavily in research and development, working to solve the challenges my company is facing in virtualizing assets for clients the size of AEP. The biggest of these challenges were processing and visualization of unlimited size datasets, collaboration around this data, accuracy of geometrically computed measurements within this data, collision of objects in virtual space, error correcting and fault-tolerant file uploads, and how to put all of this into the simple and intuitive platform You Control, which requires no browser plugins or local software. We have successfully addressed many of these challenges along the way, and I assure you, it’s harder than it looks! LiDAR is the biggest data of big data, so we have teamed up with Amazon to solve storage and computation challenges for us and for our clients. It’s exciting, a few handfuls of really smart kids and our brilliant molecular geneticists have really outdone themselves in a very short time. We haven’t completely tamed LiDAR data yet, but we have a nice start. We will need the community’s input to help finish this challenge off. My team is excited to share our results at SPAR International.”
It’s an exciting time for the 3D world and it’s exciting to see fresh faces with new technologies. You have to wonder, what other surprises are in store for you this year at Spar International 2014 from new players like New Spin?
