The project team building The Blue Light apartments in Durham has a new tool to document and share progress.
How it works
The OpenSpace solution includes a helmet-mounted camera and a corresponding application to which project floor plans are uploaded. At The Blue Light, Assistant Superintendent Garrett Garner is responsible for photography. He simply puts on the helmet cam and tells the app where he is. The system then starts taking photos every ½ second as he walks the project site.
Garrett with the helmet cam
When Garrett completes a walk, he tells the app to stop and it uploads the photos – identified by time and location – to the OpenSpace web portal. The system compiles and blends the images to provide a clear continuous image.
Afterwards, team members can view the images by date, or by click a location on the floor plan to scroll through photos from that part of the project. They can even view images side-by-side to track progress.
Benefits of the solution
“We are using the system as our main photo documentation for this project,” said Josh Moore, senior project manager. “The 360-degree photos capture an enormous amount of data. The OpenSpace website allows us to avoid the tedious process of labeling and filing individual photos. We always know when and where the photo was taken, just by uploading it.”
The images help in quality control as well, as they accurately show placement of components in slabs or walls before the work is covered up. “Ours is a cast-in-place concrete building with post tension reinforcing,” Josh explained. “Prior to each concrete pour we lay out yard sticks at sleeve locations and walk the deck (wearing the helmet cam). This provides an as-built location of our sleeves in relation to the PT cables. The team has already been able to reference past photos to head off issues in current pours.”
Sample image from the site
Because the project owner is not local, the system also enables the team to show their progress via the web portal.
“We have been very happy with the implementation of OpenSpace on our project,” said Josh. “The team has already seen how it’s helped save money and reduce time and effort for documentation. We look forward to seeing the continued benefits as we start wall framing on the project.”
