India, February 11, 2015: During his plenary session at the India Geospatial Forum, Bhupinder Singh, Senior Vice President, Bentley Systems revealed that Bentley Systems has acquired France-based Acute3D, provider of Smart3DCapture software for reality modelling.
Rapid technology advancements in scanning and photography — and especially the burgeoning application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for these purposes — are making the capture of such observations broadly and continuously affordable in sustaining infrastructure. Through reality modelling, observations of existing conditions are processed into representations for contextual alignment within design modelling and construction modelling environments.
Acute3D software automates the generation of high-resolution, fully-3D representations from digital photographs taken with any camera, whether highly specialised or embedded in a smartphone. Scalable from site to city, and with precision limited only by the quantity and quality of photography, Acute3D technology can assure that existing conditions are contemporaneously considered throughout the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations of any infrastructure asset.
Bentley System in a press release issued to media stated that since photo sequences from UAVs are likely to become the most feasible source for surveying, construction monitoring, and inspection workflows, Acute3D’s industrial-level accuracy and unlimited scalability would making it a preferred technology for UAV manufacturers and professionals around the world.
Commenting on the acquisition, Bentley Systems Founder and CTO Keith Bentley, said, “The world-class Acute3D developers have already achieved two breakthroughs, which remove the barriers to the adoption of reality modelling. First, Acute3D has made it possible for anyone to sufficiently capture existing conditions with just a camera. Of equal importance is the value of the Acute3D result. Rather than a voluminous cloud of discrete points, Acute3D produces a 3D ‘reality mesh’ — intrinsically in the same geometric idiom as engineering models, readily aligning the real-world context.”
It is worth mentioning that in China, Acute3D is working with Internet giant, Tencent, to do large-scale 3D city modelling for several mega-cities, using both aerial and street-view photography. Other applications of Acute3D have included existing conditions capture for construction sites, manufacturing facilities, mining operations, pipelines, and oil and gas exploration.
Source: Bentley Systems
