{"id":125806,"date":"2023-05-09T06:44:11","date_gmt":"2023-05-09T05:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/?p=125806"},"modified":"2023-05-04T14:00:13","modified_gmt":"2023-05-04T13:00:13","slug":"hybrid-reality-capture-the-future-of-laser-scanning-faro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/digital-construction\/hybrid-reality-capture-the-future-of-laser-scanning-faro\/125806\/","title":{"rendered":"Hybrid Reality Capture: Is it the future of laser scanning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hybrid Reality Capture combines the best qualities of mobile scanning with the best qualities of static reality capture to alter the future of laser scanning<\/h2>\n

In the last year, discussions concerning artificial intelligence seem to be everywhere. Amazingly, modern AI is now fast enough and accurate enough (though still far from perfect<\/a>) to approximate natural conversation with both speed and accuracy that mimics human-like exchanges.<\/p>\n

This same balancing act between speed and accuracy, known as the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT), plays itself out in 3D laser scanning<\/a> and its related offshoots like panoramic 360\u00b0 photography and photogrammetry.<\/p>\n

In traditional 3D reality capture, high-accuracy scans can take minutes to capture and much longer than that to process the information and register the point clouds. For any company looking to complete large-volume scans, this can mean a potential loss of business. A panoramic camera, however, can capture an image with great speed, but the data is less detailed than a 3D point cloud.<\/p>\n

Laser scanning can simplify tasks and streamline workflows<\/h3>\n

Today, those in the business of as-built documentation are continually looking for faster, better, easier ways to get the job done. They are looking to simplify tasks and streamline workflows – without sacrificing quality for speed and speed for quality.<\/p>\n

They make this effort because the entire professional measurement services industry has a lot of work on its hands. And lots of time, money and human and technological resources are at stake if BIM models aren\u2019t accurate or if image capture and processing speeds are too sluggish.<\/p>\n

Across the globe, the industry is scanning the interior and exterior of large structures; they are mapping and measuring industrial facilities like power plants, they are assisting police and law enforcement with their pre-incident planning, they are aiding speciality and general contractors in their engineering projects, and they are empowering facility managers\/owners with the real-time facility management insights they need to track building operations and to eliminate any inefficiencies they uncover.<\/p>\n

As might be anticipated, the quest to resolve the speed-accuracy trade-off ultimately took two paths: mobile scanning products and static scanning tripod-mounted 3D laser scanners.<\/p>\n

But instead of ending the SAT trade-off, all the development did was carve out two spheres of influence. Repeated studies like one conducted by the University of Cambridge<\/a> – which included a FARO Focus Laser Scanner – and shared at the 2021 European Conferenceon Computing in Construction, confirms thatmobile scanning, while fast, is not as accurateas a static scan.<\/p>\n

Hybrid computing 2.0<\/h3>\n

If humans and computers were what counted as \u201chybrid\u201d in the 1960s at NASA (human \u201ccomputers\u201d were hired to crunch critical launch and re-entry data in part because the space agency\u2019s mainframe wasn\u2019t as accurate as their genius) for 3D reality capture hybrid is about to mean a union of two types of digital formats, uniting the best qualities of mobile scanning with the best qualities of static reality capture.<\/p>\n

This union will be in the form of a new technology FARO called Hybrid Reality Capture\u2122, powered by Flash Technology\u2122,<\/a> released recently. With Flash Technology, an algorithmic merging of the data contained in a panoramic image combined with a 3D point cloud, a lower resolution 3D laser scan is augmented with data captured from a 360\u00b0 camera, resulting in up to 50% faster scanning than traditional laser scanning workflows.<\/p>\n

The benefits of Hybrid Reality Capture<\/a> should be clear:<\/p>\n