ContextCapture capabilities now include cloud processing services, a mobile app, and photo planning for Bentley’s applications.

ContextShare extends Bentley’s ProjectWise connected data environment to securely manage, share, and stream reality meshes, and their input sources, across project teams and applications. Navigator Web is a new web application that delivers high-performance streaming of very large reality meshes through the browser to desktop or mobile devices.

For infrastructure project delivery, including projects found in the mining industry, reality modelling captures the actual context of infrastructure through photos and/or scans, creating engineering-ready reality meshes for design modelling, analytical modelling, and construction modelling. During asset performance, as-operated reality meshes can serve to immersively geo-coordinate the alignment of these digital engineering models with right-time inputs from connected IoT technologies. Accordingly, reality modelling extends the scope for engineers to add value to include ‘conceptioneering’ and ‘constructioneering’ for capital projects, and ‘inspectioneering’ and ‘productioneering’ for operating assets. These use-case benefits of “continuous surveying” in turn provide new value opportunities for surveyors throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.

CEO Greg Bentley said, “Last year, I described what I believed to be the significant potential of reality modelling for improved infrastructure engineering, in particular, from continuous surveying enabled by simple digital photography and UAVs, but that was then based only on our own experience. And there could have been resistance from survey professionals concerned that this more accessible technology might jeopardise their return on investments in laser scanning specialisation, for example.

“It is gratifying to report now that in the intervening year, reality modelling has ‘gone mainstream’ globally, supporting projects and assets of every domain and scale in ‘going digital.’ Additionally, laser scanning is now fully incorporated—where available, and as needed to supplement photography—among hybrid inputs for engineering-ready reality meshes.

“Our ContextCapture and ProjectWise ContextShare announcements complete the reach, in my view, for reality modelling’s fidelity, accessibility, scalability, and shareability. In the coming year, our priority at Bentley Systems is to help engineers and surveyors take full advantage of this breakthrough opportunity to broaden the scope and value of their work in ‘going digital’ themselves.”