As the MENA region experiences a wave of rapid urbanisation, it’s again becoming a hotspot for awe-inspiring architectural feats and pioneering megaprojects. The region is in the midst of a remarkable transformation characterised by the development of sprawling, cutting-edge cities, and the introduction of innovative urban concepts. On this ambitious journey, technology is – more than ever – serving as a critical enabler and driving force.
With ambitious and aggressive plans and delivery schedules – against a backdrop of construction industry challenges such as rising costs and skilled labour shortages – it’s more important than ever to ‘do more with less’ by making quicker, more informed project decisions whilst simultaneously maximising workflow efficiencies.
How can key stakeholders track project progress across multiple sites without necessarily needing to be physically present? How can they reduce travel to, often, vast, remote locations but still make timely informed decisions? How can the time spent not travelling be reallocated to other important areas of work? How can sustainability goals be met and less site footfall be achieved, where desired? How can the use of AI really start reliably assisting the construction sector? These are all important questions that need answers, quickly.
Amidst the vast array of technologies revolutionising the construction industry, 360° Reality Capture and AI analytics has quickly emerged as a standout innovation that is redefining project visibility and execution via an image-based approach.
One company leading the charge in this area is OpenSpace, who believe that the key to success is to ‘simplify everything’ and ensure the technology is incredibly easy to use, digest and share. By simply attaching an off-the-shelf 360° camera to a hardhat, locating your position on the mobile app and pressing ‘start’ – then walking your site as usual – OpenSpace will capture it in 360° high definition and return it for viewing, on any device, typically within 15-30 minutes.
No tech background or real training is required. This is allowing project teams to track near real-time site conditions and progress from the comfort of their armchairs, unlocking numerous opportunities to make faster decisions and improve stakeholder collaboration.
OpenSpace and 360° Reality Capture is helping to directly address some of the most important construction challenges, such as improved project documentation and visibility (from groundworks to handover) enabling greater project insights and control across time, cost, quality and risk. A key advantage is the need to physically travel less by being able to address issues as they happen with relevant imagery at your fingertips. This can also produce quantifiable carbon footprint reductions in line with sustainability goals and directives, not to mention the ability to support timely pay-app decisions based on ground truth reality – the list of benefits runs deep.
As we delve deeper into the impact of this technology on the region, Construction Week Middle East spoke to Rob Matheson, OpenSpace’s EMEA Sales Director. Matheson offered his perspective on the innovative technology and its growing influence on the regional industry.
He explains: “In my two decades serving the built environment, this is by far the easiest to deploy and most valuable construction technology I’ve seen yet. When customers see OpenSpace in action on their projects – which we can achieve within 30 minutes of a site walk/capture – they are usually quite bowled over!”
OpenSpace on transforming the construction landscape
OpenSpace’s technology is proving especially useful and relevant in the Middle East, due to the sheer size, scale and often remoteness of the programme sites, as well as aggressive timelines often seen in line with mega projects’ deadlines.
Matheson explains: “360° Reality Capture is ground-breaking for a lot of people. It allows them to tap into current trends, like utilising the power of AI, travelling less, reducing carbon footprint, being generally more productive per employee and critically making almost real-time decisions without always having to be physically present. It’s making life easier from foremen to CEOs alike – for example, we work with several large regional owners with extremely hands-on C-Level executives who love the ability to view and walk their projects remotely, and give their input and direction as needed.
“OpenSpace is all about delivering incredible insights and value with minimal user effort required. I especially love seeing our customers develop new applications and use cases almost daily. Site condition assessments are typical to start but we’ve seen many expand to usage in pre-construction, handover/asset management and even façade tracking (via drones) and infrastructure (via vehicles). Then we have banks using us to help monitor their investment builds and insurance companies offering lower premiums for projects that use OpenSpace”.
He continues: “I’ve spent many years in the GCC and we’re fully committed to this region – both in terms of local teams on the ground and physical infrastructure. In fact, we went live with our dedicated KSA data centre in March to fully comply with regional data sovereignty requirements.”
Another critical aspect of OpenSpace’s impact on construction processes is the journey and evolution to be taken advantage of.
Matheson further elaborates: “The first step is to replace traditional mobile phone/clipboard documentation with 360° Reality Capture – simply by swapping them for a hard-hat mount and an off-the-shelf 360° camera that takes two pictures per second. From there, the existing process remains unchanged – simply walk your project site as usual. However, the output is improved exponentially in terms of quality and time efficiency.
Then, once fast and reliable Reality Capture becomes your standard practice, the natural evolution is to enable our Track™ AI capability, which (by doing nothing different to the above) automatically tracks and validates the percentage completed, quantity installed and rate of work across multiple trades – such as concrete, walls and ceilings, MEP, fire protection, etc. We’ve seen a few companies try and unfortunately fail in this new and advanced area of AI-based progress tracking; however, at OpenSpace this part of our business continues to see strong growth and adoption.”
Matheson concludes: “We’ve been called a ‘time machine’ or ‘Google Street View for construction’, which is nice, but only a glimpse of where we’re heading as a company. Our vision is to simplify how the world gets built using a universally understood reality/image-based approach. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in complex construction delivery, that’s probably an understatement.
We aim to give more time back to project workers at all levels, allowing them to perform critical tasks with greater evidence and ease, whilst also freeing up more time to do other important things. We also hope this means more of this incredibly hard-working industry can get home in time for dinner with their families more often!”