Building a Pioneering AR Product for Construction
Augmented reality has finally hit the construction industry not as a gimmick concept but as a real tool. Spectar is a cloud platform with applications for both HoloLens generations that Blackbird helped to develop. Specatar solutions enable BIM teams to upload their design docs to Spectar Cloud and almost immediately see their designs live at 1:1 scale on the job site.
The Challenge
Spectar team is fully focused on making the future of construction available today. However, the limitations of nowadays AR tech don't allow doing everything as wanted. BIM models might hold information about a huge skyscraper with posts the communications, and Microsoft HoloLens isn’t able to digest it posts on its own. Plus, the construction never was a one-man job: collaboration is a big part of it.
Outcomes
Blackbird developed Spectar Cloud. The web application meant to handle BIM models, model versioning, and to provide a comprehensive environment that connects BIM engineers and field workers. Any of the existing workflows like Revit, AutoCAD, Navis are supported. All BIM models can now be carefully organized by projects, versions, also converted, and automatically synced with HoloLens smartglasses.
Impact
Spectar is currently used by large construction companies on the West Coast of the United States. They already used it on multiple construction sites. However, the most publicly disclosed project is PUBG Cave in the game developer HQ. The builder had worn glasses, launched Spectar app, and built the Cave with no referring to paper blueprints, and no delays on multi-tool measurements. That simple!
“I could probably go into sales for you. It's incredible. Thanks for the great service.”
Anthony, CTO of Spectar.io
11-50 employeesHQ Los Angeles, USAClient since 2018 | AR and ConstructionSMBs currentlyTechnical summary
Designed and implement microservice application architecture on the back end.
Used Azure Virtual Machines service to deploy all the microservices for the early first version of the back end.
Deployed on Docker with Kubernetes (K8s) Container Orchestration for all other back end versions including the final ones.
Deployed front end on Microsoft Azure Web App for Containers.
Developed a really custom BIM model converter and core processor by utilizes Python with some Java-ported libraries.
Developed REST API for BIM model conversion and processing microservise.
Added support of any BIM models from market popular tools like Revit, AutoCAD, Navis.
Provided both manual and automated Quality control.
Designed UX and UI for Spectar Cloud — both for the end-user environment and for the internal operations team.
Developed application for HoloLens 2 and we are growing application for HoloLens 1.