How to Control Quality and Mitigate Risk with Laser Scanning

JOSH DESTEFANO: So you guys are all early. Do you mind if we start a little bit early? Everybody cool with that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Maybe, but they're just not going to know anything about me, and I don't really care about that. Is this the last session for everybody?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Oh, great. That's no pressure.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: That's why I want to start early. So it's me-- I'm between you and beer. That's-- yeesh-- not a good place to be. So what I wanted to talk today about was quality control and mitigating risk with laser scanning and other reality capture technologies.

I couldn't fit that whole title into the thing. So there's a few things on other reality capture technologies-- 360 photos, UAV flights, things like that, but this will talk a lot about laser scanning. And I'm open to questions. I'll probably cover some things in future slides, so I'll let you know if something is coming up that might answer your question.

But I would say go ahead and ask questions. I don't want to spend a ton of time because we've got a lot of content to go through and I want to make sure you guys get at least most of it. And I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about my approach with presenting just because I think I try to do it a little bit differently to give you guys more value.

Like, some people will come to these things and they want to get, like, a Golden nugget or two from each one of their presentations. So I try to cover a bunch of different use cases with what we're doing with laser scanning and different RC technologies in hopes that you would see something that you could apply to your job and then maybe go explore that thing or that particular workflow. So I cover over a dozen things, or we might cover over a dozen things if we get through them all.

And then the other thing I want to talk a little bit about is what I've learned about the industry through working with the US Institute of Building Documentation. Good Lord, that's huge. So that's me and the sooner we get that off the screen the better. But I'm the virtual design and construction leader for DPR in the southwest region.

And essentially, that means that I do a whole bunch of stuff with virtual design and construction innovation. And that includes everything from reality capture with 360 photos, UAVs, laser scanning, BIM, design coordination, all of it. So it's pretty much anything that IT doesn't do that has to do with technology for the most part. And then I also serve as the chair of the technology committee for the US Institute of Building Documentation. Has anyone heard of the US IBD? I know you have. [LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: No, I'm happy for it. So, yeah, not a lot of you. And I think that's part of the reason that I wanted to work that in today. So let's roll into it. So I've got a few things on 360 photography. I wanted to kind of start with telling you guys how this started at DPR. And it was an-- before the 360 degree cameras came out, we were creating these tours with a 360-- or a DSLR camera, a fisheye lens, and this nomad nodal thing I think is what it was called, and it would sort of would take multiple pictures and pull them all together.

And so nowadays, everybody's heard of the RICOH THETA, or the Garmin VIRB, or the GoPro Fusion-- LG has one too. So nowadays, it's just one shot and we're using these for job-walks, field investigation. There's some that have remote collaboration available as well.

And what's nice about them is they record the location automatically with the right software and they have an automatic timestamp. So putting that into practice, one of the apps that we like is StructionSite. And this is a view of what you might see on StructionSite. So we're pulling up a PDF plan, and as we go through, we're taking pictures.

And there's some other advanced ways to get the photos through video walks and things like that, but this is kind of the keystone of how their software works. What's neat about it is that you can do different things with it, like clash-- or compare an older picture with a newer picture. And diving into use case for us, we had a job that sprung a leak and there was a meeting to figure out, well, what do we do about this leak? Brand new building.

And so they were talking about investigating this particular leak, and the project engineer on the job said, well, hold on a second-- let's pull up the 360 photos that we had on the job. And in, like, a few minutes, they found the valve, went and fixed it, and the leak was over. So it was really quick.

And on a personal level, I used this on my own home edition, and it was really nice later on when I needed to hang things, and figure out where studs were, and different things like that. So a couple of good examples there. But a bigger example for us was actually something that we didn't even think would really be a benefit of using 360 photos. But we had a superintendent on a big job-- this is a $530 million office campus in Irvine-- and this particular superintendent was responsible for one building out of four.

And when we started using StructionSite with the 360 photos on this job, he started using it to capture his photos, and he realized that it was saving him a bunch of time on his schedule update because he could capture everything that was going on on the job site-- all the progress that had been made that day, that week. And he could deal with the distraction of walking the job site. I mean, whose superintendent doesn't get distracted walking a job site, right?

So they're bombarded with questions, they're bombarded with, hey, what do we do here-- whatever-- constantly. So instead of having to take his notes and field all that stuff, it saved him a lot of time. And knowing that he was capturing everything, he can not worry about-- he didn't have to worry about taking the schedule information down right then.

He could take the photos, go back to his desk and get the schedule if update done a lot quicker. So he actually said it was a little bit more, but he was like, I'm trying to be conservative-- he said it's almost a day sometimes. So I thought that was really cool and kind of unexpected.

So a few things on aerial photography-- another Reality Capture technology. Things that we're using it for-- we're verifying site utility locations, documenting site conditions, using it for site logistics and planning I've got an example of that coming up just next. A little bit of safety planning and some progress tracking and timelapse.

So it's some stuff you've probably heard about before, and I've got a couple other examples of that-- trying to let somebody snap a picture. [LAUGHS] So this is an example of what we might get out of that. This is using a drone like the one that was on the last slide, taking multiple photos, putting it in something like Pix4D to pull that in together into a point cloud, and then pulling the perspective out of it so that it looks like a satellite image from space.

And then this is a year over time, so you can see the progress. And we've actually got these every week, so we can do kind of a timelapse. It's kind of a neat sequence. But I think what is probably more impactful is stuff like this, where we're out on a job site having an OAC meeting, and we've got a week-old or less image of the entire job site.

And this is a 74 acre job site, so there's a lot of different stuff going on. We're building-- I think it was 900,000 square feet. So a lot of square footage, a lot of things happening. Sure, we don't get a lot of rain in California where this job was, but at this particular time we did, and so we ended up having to coordinate where these huge water storage tanks would go so that we could pump the water out of footings and different things like that. So it helped us coordinate a bunch of things.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: I'm sorry?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: No, we were doing this manually. I mean, you could get something similar out of Skycatch, but we were using mostly DJI drones. We have one just like the one that I showed on the screen-- the Inspire 2. That's a new addition to the fleet, though. Most of those that you saw were taken with a Phantom 4.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Well, we started doing drone flights a while ago. So it's interesting because this job, there was a completely different-- like, there was a huge spectrum-- and this was a couple year job at least. I forget the exact duration, but there's pre-con period and all this stuff.

We actually flew this job with an older-- one of the first drones that we were playing around with and it almost fell out of the sky. We needed to use, like, six batteries to cover this 74, 73.8, or whatever-- 75 acre site. And now we can fly it in one battery. So the technology's changed a lot, but also the regulations changed.

So when we were first doing this, it was-- they had the exemption and all that kind of stuff. We don't try to get around it. I have a pilot that does this, and checks, and the whole deal. We register all our drones, so we knew all the things were coming and we just we just complied. We had the 333 exemption or whatever when it first came out and all that stuff.

So it was just a matter of trying to get ahead of it and make sure we had a pilot available for the area. And we're trying to get more. So we just-- it can be a hindrance in certain areas because we have a lot of airports and different things. And we work in Orange County, and then you got John Wayne, you got Long Beach, you got LAX so there's some areas that are problematic.

So these are just some images of that same site where we were overlaying the aerial photography or the aerial cloud with the model to kind of see how things were comparing with where they were supposed to go. But where the real power comes in here in a lot of cases, especially with using this for the OAC meetings, is that you can see where future utilities might be, and you can start to plan ahead for moving things around, like CONEX boxes and different things like that.

So just kind of pulling this data together, it's kind of interesting what you can get out of it. So these ones specifically, I think, were Phantom 4, DJI, and Pix4D. And I think you guys have probably heard about the volume calculations that you can get. I think this might have been a shot that was posted on DroneDeploy or something like that. But we're using the software to sometimes get a quantity of a material delivered just so you can verify roughly how much was delivered. So kind of a neat thing.

But you can do other stuff, like verify how much excavation happened based on the soils. And there's a whole bunch of different things that we can do with it because it's just-- you've got some geometry now to analyze. So this speaks to the risk mitigation side of all this. And this-- again, aerial photography. And what's interesting about this particular scenario is that we avoided a claim with it.

So what happened was the subcontractor said, hey, I need a change order because it took me longer to dig my trench because there's people in the way, and I need you to pay me extra for the equipment. And so they said, well, OK, we'll check that out-- that happens. But when they looked at it, they realized that the trench got dug in the right amount of time and then the equipment just sat on the job site for like three months.

So were we going to pay them for just having the equipment sit there? No-- you know the answer to that. So good examples. Who wants to hear more about laser scanning? Who's laser scanning their projects right now? What about UAVs? What about 360 cameras?

A lot of you are doing that stuff. Sweet. So I don't need this slide because you guys know what laser scanners are. Who's using FAROs-- mostly FAROs? What about Leica? So it's like half and half.

Trimble? That's about right. Cool. So you guys know about this. Anybody buy the RTC360? [LAUGHS] I got one taker over there. You like it?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Cool. Just curious. It works. They all work. [LAUGHS]

Who has the BLK360?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: The RTC is the new one they have.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. It's fast.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yeah, it's super fast. I'm not going to lie-- it's sexy. So a lot of you guys know-- are you guys using it for as-builting-- like, as-built verification mostly? Everything? Yeah, like from-- so as-built to capturing stuff in the field? Nice.

So, yeah, we've been calling that exact-builting when we're verifying the as-built conditions. So feel free to give me credit for that. I stole it from somebody else, so. [LAUGHS] So these are probably, like, normal stuff for a lot of you guys then because this was a design model, or it was supposed to be an-- not a design-- a as-built model.

You can see the blue highlighted steel. And then when we scanned, we figured out that it was actually off by about a half a bay. So we were getting clashes with existing MEP with existing steel, which obviously doesn't make any sense. So we used that scanning to update it.

There's another quick example of new construction. So the last one was old construction. Similar thing. So they installed it a little bit differently than they had planned, so we were able to update that model. And just knowing that being able to feed that into the coordination process and not have everybody get derailed by this steel being a little bit different.

So pretty typical stuff. This one is a little bit more recent example. This is a project in Phoenix, I believe. And this was kind of interesting because we had an existing as-built model of it, because it was a recent project. And so another as-built scenario, but we kind of expected more out of this particular model.

And it looked really good. They didn't find a whole lot that was-- it was out of sync, but really liked the way this cloud in comparison turned out. And there's a lot of detail-- a lot of tiny little things in the model, but it came up pretty good.

You guys have seen a lot of that. I don't need to show you them all. So this is an interesting case study because this was not really about-- it was about existing conditions, but I think this spoke to more coordinating and informing the design side of things. So, sorry that the image is a little bit grainy, but this is a project at USC in Southern California.

And this is the new health care center and it's sandwiched in between three buildings. This is a parking structure and these administration and health care buildings. And back behind the new building, there's this-- it's sort of like a hallway.

We'll call it a hallway, but it's basically a corridor that was sort of constructed on the outside-- it almost looked like an afterthought. But there's a plaza level that it sort of butts up against, so we have to continue this plaza level that's back here through here. This all will make more sense in a second, but this is that tunnel that I was talking about, or this corridor that I'm talking about and this is the plaza level, and our new building is going to go right next to that and tie into that existing plaza level.

And basically, we're going to run steel right through the plenum of that corridor. So this corridor, not knowing anything about it, was kind of a blind spot for the team. So one of the ideas-- well, let's go spot check it, we need to get elevations, we need to know where the drains are-- we can't hit the roof drains and other things that are in that corridor roof.

So we want to try and avoid as much as possible, so let's go do some spot checks with the surveyor. And we proposed to scan it, and I was really glad we did because we ended up revisiting the scan a couple of times. And one of the things that it provided for the team-- this is the roof by the way. So we have storm drains-- or roof drains-- and this is the plaza level.

So one of the things that we were able to do is take that scan-- and we did get some survey done, and we tied it into survey control. So every time we got information on a point-- in this case, we were just inquiring on the points in Navisworks-- we had the actual elevation based on the actual data, and so we knew exactly where the height of the floor was at any given section, which is what these yellow highlights are.

And then I took these sections about where the roof drains were to show them what the space looked like above that. So we got a lot more out of it, and I think it was able to inform the design and really mitigate a lot of risk, and inform what needed to go in there and where things needed to go. And I think it helped the team out a lot, because otherwise we would have had to revisit surveying, probably a couple of times.

So a few more examples here. This is a duct bank that before it got slurried, we did a scan and we double-checked. And on this particular project, scanning is sort of part of the inspection process. And I think that this is where a lot of our projects are going to head eventually as owners start to see the power of this stuff. Is they're going to be like, well, I have a laser scanning standard just like they did, what, 10, 12 years ago with BIM.

They started realizing that they wanted this stuff and they started asking for probably more than they knew. But I think it's going to start with stuff like this, where we're kind of building reality capture into the inspection process. And we caught a big bust in this particular one, so I'm glad we didn't pour the concrete after that.

So I have a couple of similar examples. I'm going to skip this one because this one's more exciting and the visuals are more interesting. This is a corporate office project in Irvine and we're doing a whole bunch of scanning on this one. And this is the lower level where we're putting in a parking garage. And we've done this a couple of times now, where we put the shoring in and then we'll scan and analyze the surface of the shoring to let us know if any of the shoring was out of tolerance or if it's encroaching in onto the parking spaces just to double check that we can get the right thickness of the interior walls and different things like that.

And also make sure that we're not encroaching into parking spaces and having to get rid of them because they're not meeting the clearance requirements and things like that. So it's really a quality check. Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Good question. It's a mix, I would say. So some of it's manual, but there's times when we'll use skir for analyzation. Cloud based analyzation that's more of like a-- color coding the individual dots of how far something is out. We'll also use Verity is another one that will automate it, from ClearEdge, and that's more about taking the whole object and figuring out how off it is. And then in some cases with this analyzation, we're using things like Rithm or RealWorks, stuff like that where it's processing with add-ons.

AUDIENCE: What about just doing [INAUDIBLE] in Civil?

JOSH DESTEFANO: I haven't done it for Civil. We've been doing concrete mainly. What's your use case here?

AUDIENCE: We had a similar situation where the minute you started building, [INAUDIBLE].

JOSH DESTEFANO: Oh, wow.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yeah, and I think that's kind of what we're doing. It's just vertical surface analyzation, right? So in this case, we're doing it on shoring, we've done it on concrete walls to make sure they were flat enough with the finish. And we've done it on drywall, which was a good one. We had this-- it was a show wall. They were going to do a laser light show, and we used the same sort of workflow to figure out how high-low the different layers of the drywall with level 5 finish-- super smooth.

And so at different stages, we scanned and then analyzed it in the same type of way. What's neat about this project too is we're scanning all the rebar and capturing everything that's going to be embedded in the concrete so that we'll have a record of where literally everything is. And then working with the same client for VR with different finishes, and they're just having a lot of fun on that one with using some of this technology.

So one that hits home for a lot of folks that work for contractors that self-perform is things like embeds. Luckily, this isn't our self-performed team who's supposed to be installing [LAUGHS] these, I found out, which I'm glad because I would hold them to a little bit higher standard, or I would hope we would hold them to a little bit higher standards. But what we did here was we scanned pre-pour and then we compared that to the embed plan and we found some issues.

We found in this particular case, I think there was seven embeds on one deck that weren't installed. Like, that could be a big deal. So whatever it is-- a few thousand dollars for scanning and having the equipment out there to go do this process. It pulled together-- overlay the information is way worse-- or way worth, rather, the issues that we caught.

It would cost a lot more money to have to fix those. Anybody using scanning for this purpose? You guys are-- a couple? Have you found the same value from it?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yeah. Is anybody doing floor flatness laser scanning? Are you guys using Rithm or something else?

AUDIENCE: FARO ReCap.

JOSH DESTEFANO: FARO ReCap. And doing a heat map?

AUDIENCE: Cyclone.

AUDIENCE: You can do that in AutoCAD.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Are any of you doing the ASTM FFFL reports with it too? Couple-- yeah. So that's what this next thing was to talk about, is that moving from the old dipstick method to the laser scanning technology for floor flatness. So if you're not familiar with the dipstick, it was this device-- a little box and it had pads that were a foot away.

And that's not what he's doing in the picture-- that's like a laser spot check elevation, but the dipstick was much more precise. And they would walk this thing on the deck after it was dry, and they would take all those elevation differences, run it through some calculations, and come up with an ASTM compliant FF and FL report, which is Floor Flatness and Floor Levelness report.

And there's all this math, and essentially what Rithm did, which is a company that makes an addon for FARO SCENE is they figured out how to do all that within the scan environment. So take that same-- emulate that same process. So do a scan, and as if you were walking it, you're running a line and analyzing the data.

So a little bit on that process is that if we were to need to scan a newly poured deck for floor flatness, we might do something like this, where we would look at scanning this 13,000 square foot deck. And after it's walkable, we would go through in each bay, and we'd capture the scan, and we'd process it and bring it in. And you would see something like a heat map, and I've got some examples of the deliverables in a second.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yes, I do. So that was-- getting there. Yeah, so this is kind of how we started. You start with-- what he asked was, do we ever scan when it's wet? So yes is the answer. And this is kind of where we started with. Just getting good at the FFFL reports afterwards, because even if you scan while it's still wet you still have to do the report at the end of the day.

So what we realized is that now we can get a lot more information out of it. We can get a heat map, we can get a contour map and the FF and FL report, and so we end up with a lot more information. And the heat map doesn't-- like, people don't really know what to do with it. They don't really know what to do with the floor flatness report, because it's just a number.

And that's what it's designed to do is say, well, my floor my floor is flat to-- is a 45. And the guys over in the field are like, all right, cool-- is it out of tolerance or [LAUGHS] not? And you're like, well, it's supposed to be a 50. Well, then tell me what to do. So this contour shows where the issues would be. The heat map shows that as well.

We found the most value in combining both of them. So you can kind of see the colorization and the contrast, but then you also have the numerical value of the contour maps. And there's another example of it. And where this gets important is knowing where you might have door swing issues or you might have to spend a bunch of time shimmying things, stuff like that.

Here's an example of a contour map. I just like this one because it looks really interesting. It looks like a heat map but it's not. And the slope in the middle there was actually intended.

So this is a theater room, so there's supposed to be some slope to it. But it was just a really cool image to show that the guys put together to see how well that concrete was finished. And how-- like, the straighter that line is, the better that-- or the straighter the transition of colors is, the better it is. What's up?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Oh, we do it in-house. Oh, the software? I thought you said consultant. This is FARO SCENE with Rithm, I believe.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Sometimes. Not all the time for floor flatness stuff. Usually don't need it between-- it's pretty simple. We just have the-- you've got the columns and everything out there. And a lot of times, for some of the floor flatness stuff, there's only a few scans, so it's not like we have a ton and there's a bunch of different things. So it's not that difficult.

What we do do is we have a stringent process to go through. When we post-process everything and we're putting everything together, we want that to be-- that registration to be super tight so we have a really high-- a really tight tolerance, I should say, on where we want it to be so that we know that everything's meshing together good. And then there's not getting too much overlap between the different scans.

Hopefully, this video plays. So someone asked about wet scanning. That was kind of always in the roadmap, if you will, that if we have this technology where we can go get the floor flatness and we don't have to walk on it, can we do it earlier?

And so if you can do it earlier, then you can give feedback. And what's awesome about that is this is a process that has, like, almost no feedback. The only feedback you get is a guy walking around the edges kind of checking a few things here and there, and that's just not adequate. We're not getting flat floors from that.

And why is this important to DPR? Well, we build hospitals, we build operating rooms, we build different things where they have they have really sensitive equipment. So these flat floors are kind of a big deal, and we don't want to grind and patch them later. So I don't know if you saw that, but what I like about this video is that the laser scan tech tells him there's a spot-- oh, here it is. He's like, there's a spot over there that's high. And you know what the guy is saying-- he's going, (QUIETLY) bullshit.

[LAUGHTER]

And then he walks over there with the laser and he goes, yep-- OK, maybe it's low. But he goes, yeah, come over here. And I just-- like, I love that part, because it's you know he's not trusting the technology yet, but all of a sudden you realize, yeah, we did make a mistake. So who knows what we would have had to do there. It's a little example, but I think it's pretty awesome that we're--

[LAUGHTER]

--that we're able to do that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: A lot of times when we're doing the wet scanning, it's just one scan, so we don't have to register. You just be strategic about where you place it. And we're doing-- when you do a scan for four wet concrete, you've got to do it in sections anyway, because there's like a 20 minute window. Right after they bull float, you've got to scan it and then process it, and go, here's where you're off, and then move to the next thing. So it's an all-day process.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: So let me clarify. Even if we wet scan, we do have to scan afterwards because we still need an FFFL report for the whole slab. So we have to do that anyway. It depends on the size of the base, but we try to stay pretty tight and not go beyond, like, 30 feet.

So we try to-- when we do the full scan afterwards, we'll take more than we need. It's always better to scan more often than necessarily higher resolution.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: No, I don't think we're going really high resolution with it. I'm trying to think of the numbers, but I'd say it's in the high medium range. I don't think it's anything crazy. I mean, I'm interested to see what we can do with more data, like with an RTC360 that gets a lot more-- or some of the time of flight scanners that get really dense cloud. I'd love to see what that does, but it's been pretty accurate-- pretty consistent.

The ASCC is looking at-- and the ACI are developing some concrete construction standards with laser scanning right now. They've been kind of working on this for about a year and a half, and we've been invited to some of the meetings to kind of tell them what we've been doing. And they recently did a study where they brought a bunch people together to scan. And they did the dipstick, and then they did this method, and they compared all the data, and they're sort of working through all that right now.

Probably if you go to World of Concrete or something like that, you'll probably see some info from them on it. But they're trying to figure out, do we need a new standard, is this really as repeatable and consistent as people say it is, that kind of stuff.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Yeah. No, [LAUGHS] we haven't. It's all been FAROs. So we've used a variety of FAROs. We've used [INAUDIBLE], but TX5 is a FARO really. But we've used the FARO X 330, we've used the 130, we've used TX5, we used an S 150. I think we've used the S 350.

We've played around with a Leica-- we haven't got one yet. But yeah, you have some deflection. But still, like with the wet concrete-- when it's still wet, any data at that point is better than nothing. So that's kind of-- I get that-- that, well, some of it might not be great, but I'd rather have some than absolutely nothing. And this gives us a lot more than nothing.

And we're playing around with different ways to get it into the hands of the folks that need it the most quicker.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: Hold on one sec. Hugh had his hand up.

AUDIENCE: Does it give you license to check for slopes and things like that?

JOSH DESTEFANO: Here and there-- not a lot. I think we've played around with some slopes on sidewalks and things like that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: I think the last one, the one where I showed the contour map, I think one of the things that we did was we looked at-- we had, like, a 2% slope we were trying to hit. So I know we've done a little bit of that, but it's not something we do all the time.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: For concrete?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Absolutely. Yeah, we switched over to doing the laser scanning floor flatness workflow in 2016 for the Southern California business unit, so not every DPR office. I'm working to expand this into the whole southwest-- Phoenix down to San Diego. But this is how the self-perform group in SoCal does all their floor flatness reports. And we've done a few other things with scanning with concrete as well.

AUDIENCE: Generally speaking, [INAUDIBLE] on return on investment. I know there's a lot of resistance. So you'd say, hey, guys, have you thought about using this? They'd say, well, we don't need that. What are you getting as a percent return, or are you measuring that?

JOSH DESTEFANO: I'm probably not measuring it the way that we should, but everybody's been really happy with the progress. I don't know if I have a number as far as return. I mean, it's definitely paid for itself easily.

AUDIENCE: Better than not.

JOSH DESTEFANO: Right. And what it does is, unfortunately, it takes some business out of someone else's hand that was providing-- our dipstick partner. But at the same time, it gives us a lot more control. It allows us to explore this other stuff with the wet scanning. And who doesn't want to keep some money that could stay in-house in-house, right? So it's like--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: I explained that we could do what we were-- we could do the same thing for the same cost, if not less, and also provide more information. And for some people, that was enough. [LAUGHS] And we had a whole host of other things we can use scanning for.

So I made the case that, hey, we've got x amount of pours planned for the next year. And with that, I can bring in a certain amount of money. We can explore this other stuff, we can-- so there's a whole bunch of tangible benefits, there's a whole bunch of intangible benefits to it. So it was kind of a no-brainer, I think, for us just to experiment.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: I think a lot of them are. I don't think-- I think a lot of folks are dabbling in it, which is awesome. I want to see us, just as an industry, using this stuff more. That's kind of why I'm up here today talking about this stuff. So these are just some slides from testing this stuff.

This was an example before and after situation where it's one of our very early tests with wet scanning. And it's hard to see what's going on here, quite honestly. And the one on the right is the before. This isn't the updated slide that makes sense, so sorry about that.

But you can see how different these contours are and how much smoother they are. And we're only talking about a change of about a half an inch. So there was a variation of half an inch that went-- or, I'm sorry, a change about a quarter of an inch, but a lot smoother, a lot better just flatness overall. So very early, early one.

So this is kind of a different thing. Switching gears a little bit from concrete when it's dry. This is a job that we did some light concrete monitoring on, meaning we went in and scanned while it was reshored. And I include this one because this saved us a big claim that probably would've cost us-- I don't know-- say, $20 million-- $20,000. Sorry, that's a bigger--

[LAUGHTER]

[WHISTLES]

--$20,000 roughly, because they thought that we didn't shore it up correctly. But we were able to show them, no, look, when we had it reshored, it was shored flat. And then when we pulled it out and you started loading the building, things started moving around, and we were able to prove that. So that was a nice little plug for scanning for floor flatness.

AUDIENCE: You're soliciting to the contractors for these?

JOSH DESTEFANO: Say that again?

AUDIENCE: You're sending this to the contractor or--

JOSH DESTEFANO: So in this case-- so I'm the general contractor. We have a self-perform concrete crew on this project. So we put the concrete in and we coordinated the reshoring and all that kind of stuff. So it was us having the foresight to document what was happening on the site.

And then they were curious or concerned about the deflection. And they said, hey, did you guys reshore it right? And we said, yes, and they said prove it, and we were able to prove it. So it was pretty simple. But yeah, a lot of it was in-house, and it was just having the foresight to spend a few thousand dollars on an additional scan to capture all of it.

So we've only got about 10 minutes left, and we do want to get out of here early. So I just wanted to touch on kind of one of the things I mentioned with the US Institute of Building Documentation, and really just tell you about some things that we're working on. So I work on the technology committee and essentially, what we do is we do market research on this kind of technology, and standards, and state of the industry, and all things technology related to building documentation.

And what the US IBD is trying to do is to educate the industry, create standards, education, awareness, all this kind of stuff around building documentation. So they've got a level of accuracy specification that you can use to compare and sort of-- everybody's familiar with LOD, so kind of think LOD for documenting your building. So how close did the documents come to what the actual as-built condition-- the real world condition is?

And it gives you a scale. They do some other things as well. I really just wanted to get to some of the meat of this. That these studies are out there-- that the reports are out there. A lot of this stuff is available on the website. The team has been doing these since 2013.

And this is all to gear us up to talk about CSR number 11-- cornerstone number 11 where we did a really deep dive this year on reality capture hardware. So that's all to say that I participate in trying to poll market research on how much this stuff is actually being used. And part of what I'm trying to tell you guys today is that if you want to get better quality and mitigate risk with reality capture, you've got to use it. So I'm glad that a lot of people are using it.

And we're seeing through these surveys that a lot more people are scanning. We're also seeing a lot more contractors get involved in these particular surveys. And it's interesting to see-- we look at which hardware manufacturers are preferred. We looked at different factors that drive decision making in terms of which hardware you might buy.

So what factors are important-- is it accuracy, is it speed, is it weight? And we kind of weighted those questions. And we looked at a bunch of different hardware categories. We looked at some of the stuff we talked about today-- 360 cameras, laser scanning. We looked at mobile scanners, like GeoSLAM and stuff like that.

We also looked at UAVs and fixed site cameras. It was interesting-- that was one of the lowest ones being used was the fixed site camera. I thought that was kind of the easy one.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSH DESTEFANO: So we didn't go that depth to some of those other things. We had some people comment on, oh, we bought this scanner. It was a Matterport. So I think we kind of put those in the lower spectrum of the stationary laser scanner even though it's not. But it's-- yeah.

So we didn't really address that there's other devices, but definitely the BOK would fall under that. So these are just some demographic stuff. But really, I just kind of wanted to end it with go check out the report. You can download it on the website.

It's got some interesting stuff about these different categories and how much they're being used. So stationary scanners, obviously, kind of not a surprise there that it was like 73% of the industry is using those, or 73 of those companies surveyed. I think we got 260 some odd responses back, so it was pretty substantial. But not a lot of adoption with mobile scanners.

360 cameras were, like, 60% of those that we surveyed, so quite a bit there. And then fixed site cameras was about 30%. So just seeing that-- to my knowledge, this is one of the only surveys that talks about specifically reality capture and how much it's being used. I know there's-- maybe JBKnowledge talks a little bit about that too.

But if you want to learn more about kind of where things are right now, I would say check this out. Some of the other key findings-- I kind of went through this, but some neat stuff is 70% of people using scanning are reporting a positive ROI. So again, use it. [LAUGHS] It's good stuff.

So interesting thing here-- if you've been around reality capture and talk to surveyors, it's kind of surprising that they're preferring FAROs. Some of them talk about that not being survey grade, so we found that really interesting. A lot of contractors report using Leicas and Trimbles. Very few people are renting them. They're buying them most of the time.

Now granted, you go back to the demographics and you'll see that primarily large companies and things like that that play into those factors. some similar stuff with our 360 photos. Very quick adoption over the last couple of years. They've gotten a lot cheaper, a lot faster, a lot smaller.

A lot of people are owning 20 or more, which isn't surprising-- you can buy one for $100. And a huge report-- 87% seeing a return on investment. Obviously, the investment is quite low, but when you get into enterprise agreements with different software vendors, like HoloBuilder, StructionSite, OpenSpace, where you're using that camera and you're just deploying it over multiple projects, then obviously the cost goes up and you have to drive adoption and all that different stuff.