Toward the Future
Better Information for Facility Management: The Scan to Building Information Model
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Lam, Geoffrey Yuk Kai Shea, Xiaoli Ding, Hon Wah Low
The implementation of building information model (BIM) enhances facility management. It aims to extend the building information application from 2.5 dimensions to 5 dimensions which enables the uses of spatial data with temporal and costing dimension. However, most of the constructed environment are lack of existing building information. Surveyors need to have intensive measurement for building information for better facility management. With the development of laser scanning technology, the massive building information would be collected with safe, reliable, and effective approaches. Researchers have lots of attempts to develop effective and efficient approaches for building objects extraction from unorganized point cloud. This paper proposes a new approach to extract and recognize the building object information with the considering of the object nature, building style and the use machine learning. The result of this study is presented and evaluated.
Dronesphere: Archaeology of Future Airscapes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Benjamin Ralston, Simon Rabyniuk
Aerial photographs of the United Kingdom taken during the drought of 2018 revealed crop marks tracing past settlement patterns. These indexical marks brought to light long-buried sites of human occupation that had restructured terra firma in the British Isles. The physical and conceptual practice of archaeology is easily recognized in such acts of uncovering historical urban structure as cultural artefact. This paper extrapolates on the practice of archaeology as an act of uncovering and retrieving artefacts, but inverts our gaze toward the air. Exterior space becomes airspace when described in legal terms. The British common law’s historic position on airspace assumed that property owners held exclusive rights to the space above their land. This is expressed in the Latin maxim cujus est solum ejus est usque ad caelum et ad infernos, indicating that ‘one who owns the land, owns what is below and above to an indefinite extent.’ Yet with the normalization of aviation over the past century, past assumptions were quickly re-configured to account for increased human use and occupation of this territory. A normalization of unmanned aerial vehicles will soon require further reimagining of our relationship to the airspace. While no city has yet experienced a wide-spread integration of unmanned aerial vehicles, pilot projects already exist for every populated continent. This paper investigates the traces from this restructuring of airspace and reflects on their implications for design disciplines in transition.
Online Tools for Adding Hapticity to the Design Process: Augmented Reality, Online Reality, Real-time Rendering, and Haptic Drawing Devices
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Brody
At its best, architecture is a sensuous experience, appealing to the eyes, but also to our other senses: touch, hearing, smell, and even proprioception. The inclusion of these elements as part of our design explorations has been expressed as hapticity, per Paalismaa and others, and is meant to encourage a more intimate experience of our built environment. The design process does not always include any sense other that sight, however. Hand drawing has a tactile feedback which allows at least a modicum of physical interaction: the pencil on the tooth of the paper; arm and head movements. Electronic media are purely visual, though, with mouse clicks comprising the majority of the physical interaction. Does the spread of more interactive media into the architectural field increase sensitivity to the opportunities of designing for the other senses? Initial research studies, including from a neurological perspective, seem to indicate that it does. For architects, these tools allow more interaction with their projects, and in particular, the ability to explore a project as a whole, rather than the zoomed-in narrowly focused view typical of electronic modeling. Drawing devices with haptic feedback give more of a feel to the drawing process, and augmented reality is especially valuable for clients. These complex tools take a long time to master, and so can be difficult to incorporate for students and busy professionals. The reward is that they can be of value for both the designer and, especially, for clients, to better understand the experience of their designs.
