Cupix Video: CupixWorks Intro for Architects and Engineers in Construction | Video courtesy of Cupix YouTube Channel | 28 July 2021

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Your thoughts?

Dan

Transcript (video above)

[00:00:00]
Paul Collart: - Okay. Let's go ahead and get started here. Good afternoon, or I guess potentially good morning for some of you, and welcome to our webinar on CupixWorks. Our main topic today will focus on how you can drastically reduce job site visits during predesign and planning for tenant improvement and remodeling projects.

I know all of you are very busy and have a lot of options for content, so many thanks for tuning in to this webinar. As for our agenda, we're planning to present about 40 minutes and try to leave about 10 minutes or so for some questions. Please feel free to send your questions into the Zoom Q&A chat box. Depending upon time, we'll do our best to answer these at the end of the webinar.

My name is Paul Collart, I'm the VP of Customer Engagement at Cupix and I'll be your host. I'm presenting today from my dining room in Palo Alto, which is definitely a sign of the times in this age of social distancing. I'll apologize ahead of time if you start to hear a little music that sounds like My Little Pony.

I let my daughter's know I've put an important webinar, but you never know what happens. I've been with Cupix for a couple of years now and primarily focused on integrating Cupix works within workflows for the built world lifecycle. My background is in technology and software in the AEC industry.

Our guest today is Jose Cotto who's the president of CAS Architects in Mountain View which is located here in Silicon Valley. Their office is actually a stone's throw from Google's headquarters. But I have a feeling, Jose, you aren't calling from home.

[00:01:38]
Jose Cotto: - I'm, and I'm calling from my bedroom.

[00:01:41]
Paul Collart: - Well, you don't have your video on, so if you don't have pants on, that's okay. Jose, I was hoping you could start and maybe talk a little bit about CAS Architects and your company.

[00:01:56]
Jose Cotto: - We're a firm of about 25 and we are located in Mountain View as Paul noted, which is the midpoint between South Bay and San Francisco in the North Bay. It is right in the heart of Silicon Valley. We are a firm that specializes in catering to advanced technology companies.

We do work with Google, we work with other companies similar to Google, but also companies in the life sciences, biotech companies, pharmaceutical, drug, research and development. Everything under the sun for microelectronics, datacenters.

Anything that involves intellectual property or development of services or products devices, we have some handling that. We are just an architectural firm. We've been around since 1978. We really just work out of the Bay Area. We don't have multiple offices into a single location. I've known Paul for a very long time.

[00:03:00]
Paul Collart: - I should also something I was going to say that we have known each other a very long time. It's actually a really long time. I actually started working at CAS when I was a senior in college. They used to squirl me away in the back corner at their only CAD station and having me learn this new fangled AutoCad. I think it was released 10 running on dots. But it was crazy.

[00:03:25]
Jose Cotto: - 1988.

[00:03:28]
Paul Collart: - No, not that early. We don't need to get into dates here, Jose. It's crazy that you got this 21 year-old kid in school for engineering without any experience in architecture to figure out how to implement CAD into your workflow. I think it turned out okay, but you might have a different opinion on that subject.

[00:03:50]
Jose Cotto: - But anyway, it ended up being a great career for you.

[00:03:52]
Paul Collart: - Anyway, it gives you an idea of how long we've known each other. We actually are still in touch since those really fun days we had so long ago when we were young. But many thanks Jose for joining. Maybe expect some beer to be dropped off this weekend at your house.

I know most of you tuned in to hear from Jose. But I wanted to take a few minutes to talk just a little bit about Cupix. Cupix was founded in 2015 and we currently have 35 people across offices in San Francisco Bay area, Dallas, and Korea, and we're still growing.

We have a great dynamic of people, including your hardcore R&D engineers with extensive experience in 3D, industry experts in architecture, engineering, and construction. The founding team of Cupix are pioneers in the 3D space.

They developed a program called Rapid Form, which later rebranded Geomagic and it became the world's best-selling point Cloud processing software. It also manipulated free form geometric objects. It was primarily used in aerospace engineering and manufacturing applications.

But it actually did get used in AEC. Frank Gehry was actually using Rapid Form in the day on some of his crazy design projects. But after selling the company to 3D Systems, who was one of the largest manufacturers of 3D printers in the world, the same team started TeamPlatform, which was the first cloud-based collaboration software for engineers, and of course 3D Systems gobbled them up couple a years after, and now they're on Cupix.

A little bit of a disclaimer. I was not part of the Cupix founding team, I didn't work for Rapid Form, I didn't work on the TeamPlatform team. Simon, our CEO, who is also our CTO, happens to live in a neighboring city to me. We got in touch a while ago while I was researching some technologies for AAC and see how it can be used.
We got together on many occasions. It's actually a lot of occasions. After finally asking him over and over to join the team, he finally relented. But quite honestly, working at Cupix, it's just been a great experience for me to work with some really smart people. Jose would probably say much smarter than me, but I'm okay with that.

Again, before we get into this a little bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about CupixWorks. I have a little video there running. I'm not going to be able to get into much details because we really want to hear from Jose. But CupixWorks is a 3D digital platform that enables AEC professionals or even service providers to create and share 3D visual sites that people can explore virtually without actually visiting the site.

This makes your job sites more accessible and actionable for all stakeholders regardless of their technical skill or the environment they're in, which today could be the office, it could be the job trailer, could be in your car, your mobile device, or your home, which is really become the new normal now.

What makes this all happen is how CupixWorks in just 360 panoramic images or video from consumer grade 360 cameras and figures out how they all exist to each other in physical space and it automatically pins them to plans and build models.

I make it sound easy, but there is a lot of technology and development that went into this effort. That's really one of the core strengths of the team that I was just talking about. We're just releasing CupixWorks in an early adopter phase.

It does represent a big upgrade and really solidifies our commitment to solutions and workflows within this AEC industry. Again, we don't have time to go through everything. Again, people want to hear from Jose. But definitely people look out in the near future for more features to take advantage of the spatial intelligence and really extend CupixWorks into more AEC workflows.

Let's go to this next slide here. Really our topic today is about De-densifying the job site or the project site. This de-densifying is a term I first heard from Shane Flanagan at Dome Construction, and we really latched onto it. This whole concept is especially important in our current environment.

We're really changing the way how we collaborate and work together. I think the entire AEC industry is really trying to figure out how to keep their products on track. Hopefully what Jose and I go through can show you how CupixWorks and potentially help with that. This is a diagram that we plagiarized from Autodesk BIM 360.

What it does is it talks about the construction life cycle. You start with design, you go through pre-construction, and you go through field operations, and then handover, and operations. Excuse me.

What isn't illustrated in this diagram is, there actually should be an arrow going from Handover operations to that design because it's always changing. Buildings are constantly been updated, changed, expanded.

Notice the certain terms in there are highlighted, and those are the workflows that we feel Cupix can really enable and benefit by using our system. Right now you're actually catching the second half of a two-part series to introduce Cupix works to the AEC industry.

My colleagues, Scott Anderson and [inaudible 00:09:48] Morphy along with our guests [inaudible 00:09:50] who I was just talking about earlier with [inaudible 00:09:52] . They had a great session last Wednesday on how Dome is using Cupix works during the two middle cards there for pre-construction and field operations.

Feel free to reach out to us, if you want to get a recording of that session. But what we're here to talk about is the design side. Note how I put like a little parenthesis under design, and I added remodel in there. Our discussion is really focusing not on new construction, we're focused on remodels and tenant improvement projects.

These projects might not be as exciting as let's say, the new Oakland Raiders stadium in Vegas or a newly designed Frank Gehry museum, but the reality is half of this country's 5.6 million commercial buildings, so offices, hospitality, education, health care, manufacturing, distribution were all constructed before 1980.

We have a lot of old buildings. What you'll find is of all the money getting into commercial construction projects, the majority of this goes to remodels and [inaudible 00:11:02]. It is very applicable how Cupix can really say it. The next slide again, I'm trying to get through these very quickly. I just wanted to talk, just highlight the teams that are involved in this design phase. I've broken them down between design, city, construction and the owner or the tenant.

We're going to touch on a lot of these as we're talking, I know we're talking with Jose, who's on the design side as the architect, but Cupix works really can touch everybody in there. Jose is going to talk a lot about how he's using Cupix works and make sure he touches everybody involved in that design team for that project.

What I would like to do is talk about a case study. It's for 800 corporate the CAS had worked on. What I was hoping to do is have Jose talk about the project, the size, the scope, and everything else, and as you're talking Jose, I'm just going to go through the project a little bit.

[00:12:20]
Jose Cotto: Yeah.

[00:12:21]
Paul Collart: So people get an idea of the size and everything else associated to that.

[00:12:25]
Jose Cotto: Sure.

[00:12:26]
Paul Collart: Hoping my internet behaves. So go ahead Jose.

[00:12:31]
Jose Cotto: A little bit of background on this project. It's located in Fremont, California. It's a 150,000 square foot single story structure. It was going to go through a conversion process from largely a warehouse structure to a new biotech drug manufacturing facility.

So it was important for us to have the building captured using Cupix so that we can verify the validity of various drawing that we receive from the client through their real estate brokers and other entities, to determine how accurate were CAP file, how accurate were the as-built drawings, the prints that were handed to us. This project is located at about 20 minutes from our office.

Typically on a project like this, we would be making a certain number of visits throughout design, but this tool allows us to minimize the amount of time we get on the freeway to get to the site. We still are going to do an initial site visit, and it's usually a core number of people that would do that visit, but the rest of the extended team would actually be able to leverage Cupix, and avoid having to go to the site repeatedly at the start point through design.

You can see what Paul is doing here. It captures a 360 degree total virtual reality model, and this allows us to be able to fill the gaps. This building for instance was built in the late '80s, and went through several remodels throughout the '90s and the early 2000, and the documentation is ad hoc, not very consistent.

Some projects were well documented, others were not as well documented, were done, down and dirty. Some documents were lost, we have flour plans, but we didn't have reflected ceiling plans, we didn't have any section.

This model really starts to fill the gap in so that we can actually, well after the initial site visit, leverage this tool to go through the project as we're starting with programming and preliminary design, and start to check existing conditions, and invariably with our projects, the client determines just how much of the building gets remodeled.

It's usually not a 100 percent redo all the interiors, and so we're going to identify the spaces that we're going to be making modifications, we're able to use the model to take measurements, for information that's missing so that we can go back in and construct sections. In this case this is the lobby, and these tools will allow us to then be able to work on our Revit model. We use Revit at CAS, to then fill in the gaps that are not available via documents. Go ahead Paul.

[00:15:17]
Paul Collart: No. One thing I wanted to bring up at the beginning here is that I did want to mention what Cupix is not good for. You had mentioned you have existing documentation, and Cupix really wants that and we can adhere to that existing documentation.

If you have a building that you don't have any as-built of this type of scale, Cupix is not the right solution for you. You going to want to default to either laser scanning, mobile LIDAR scanning, or the old-fashioned way with a laser, measure and tape measure. That's what I want to mention there Jose.

[00:16:07]
Jose Cotto: Go ahead.

[00:16:08]
Paul Collart: No, I was going to say I just wanted to make note that we are able to get measurements out of here. So there's no point cloud, there's no mesh or anything that we're measuring off, we're actually measuring within the images. This goes to some of the tech that we have on the backend, in terms of how we triangulate the location and data.

The way this works is that, one the floor is configured, so the easiest thing is to just do a very simple dimension on the floor, and go over there. Notice I didn't care about the making an orthogonal because we're always going to present you with an XYZ offset associated to that. That works great in the sense when you're working with things on the floor. But if you're doing things in 3D space, we use a method where you actually pick a common point from within two images, and it basically triangulates how that exists within physical space.

Here I'm going to figure out the height, let's say of the [inaudible 00:17:09] Notice how I pick one point, and it's asking me to pick the second point to be able to determine where that exists in space. Now here if I just want to know the height, I'm just going to pick anywhere on the floor, and notice how it's giving me the XYZ offset associated to that. That's how we facilitate dimensions within the system. Sorry to interrupt you there, Jose.

[00:17:32]
Jose Cotto: It's okay, not a problem. Paul is correct, this is what we use to fill in the gaps on our Revit model. I think Paul we are aware that this is a one percent accurate in terms of the dimensions you get. So if I'm looking at a 30-foot dimension, it's going to be within one percent of what the actual dimension is, which for our purposes, if existing spaces and we're not tearing down and building new, it's good enough for what we do.

But the other thing that's wonderful about this is because it's not a point cloud where you're just using an abstract model, it's based on three-dimensional imagery. You can look at the quality of the finishes, because a lot of times the project is about building new spaces within the existing building, but it's also finding out what needs to get [inaudible 00:18:19] simply because it's dilapidated in nature.

You don't have to worry about quantifying that on your first visit or a couple of visits, you can take your time after this has been captured, to assess the entire building. This tool becomes ever so more valuable the bigger the building is, because if you have to think about the resources that are required to take 2-3 people out to a site.

There's another project that we worked on that we did Cupix, that's about twice the size of this building, 300,000 square feet. You could imagine having to walk 300,000 square feet on multiple visit physically, the time-consuming effort to do that on a building of that scale.

Whereas this model allows us to just simply jump from one part of a building to another based on our interests at that given point on the information we need to get at. You go to the site physically, you actually have to come through lobby, go through the security, sometimes get escorted, and appear somewhere deep in the bowels of the building, that easily could be another 15-20 minutes just to get to that point after you've gotten to the site.

This is where savings start to be realized in terms of the usefulness of this tool, and how we can through the entire design phase be constantly referenced. Paul showing there the way you can tag elements in that image.

Throughout the model you can tag fire extinguishers, you can tag the electric panel boards, horns, strobes, so that when you go to the model and the tags are created, you can look at the floor plan view, and see where all of these items are located. So extremely helpful, in getting understanding about the existing conditions that you're going to be going in, and altering to some extent.

[00:20:02]
Paul Collart: I'll navigate to the bathroom which I know is always fun for everybody.

[00:20:05]
Jose Cotto: Yeah.

[00:20:10]
Paul Collart: Those are discussions I have with architects. This is they just love not having to get to bathroom. I think all architects hate get in here and trying to get information, so it's because they are useful.

[00:20:23]
Jose Cotto: I will make one point. It's clearly advantageous to do it in a building that's unoccupied. You do have to do some logistics and buildings that are occupied to arrange a time for whoever you're using to perform the scanning of UC Cupix to be able to have the access to every room. That's a key point, so you have to be able to access every room.

You can't just roll the dice and have to come up there and hope to get access to everything and find out from security that you're running into issues. If the building is not occupied, not a problem. Very easy to do. A little more logistics required. It's just simply planning and making sure that the tenant and the landlord, understand that you need access to that whole building.

Paul and I have talked about this, some of those scans were done off-hours so that they wouldn't be employees around and that worked probably best for us to do that. But, things like restrooms that Paul just mentioned, we capture the men's and the women. You're never having to worry about knocking on the door and asking if there's anybody in there. Once it's captured, you're good to go.

Anybody else that's attending this Webinar, that does a lot of remodels. You know that one of the first things you always have to do is figure out from an accessibility standpoint, with compliance, with the Justice Department, ADA, but also the way the state implements accessibility. What are the upgrades that are required to make this building accessible?

The older the building, the more likelihood you're going to find some non-compliant conditions. The visual conditions that you can look at here it's going to help you greatly to be able to find out what's acceptable and what isn't?

[00:22:04]
Paul Collart: I apologize if I missed this, but I know you're updating all your ceiling elements from this and a lot of this visuals.

[00:22:10]
Jose Cotto: Correct.

[00:22:11]
Paul Collart: It's a [inaudible 00:22:12] fire supply or turns. Even depending upon how detailed you get into that BIM model. You can get detail to determine, is this the full-height wall or does this log go to the underside of the celling? You're able to determine that these are both full-height walls.

You'd be able to determine to get on the other side of that, the ceiling. There's a lot here that's going to enable you to get those BIM models accurate and up to date.

[00:22:44]
Jose Cotto: Correct. The views that Paul is showing there, you do have if you're using a mouse and you have a wheel on your mouse, you are able to zoom in and out of any image. You zoom up to a door frame, zoom up to the corner of the wall as Paul mentioned.

But a lot of times, a good example of this would be you can see fire sprinkler head. It's 15 sprinkler heads. With 90 percent of the time never get our hands on sprinkler drawings. They're usually done by the contractor and not by an engineering firm.

Just a side note for CAS so you guys understand. In Silicon Valley, over 90 percent of all of our remodel projects are done on a design-build basis. That's the situation where you're doing design-build, CAS is not bringing on board engineering consultants.

You are working together at the same time with a general contractor who brings on mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design-build contractors. That's the type of work that we do mostly in Silicon Valley. It's what the clients prefer because of the delivery model in terms of schedule and cost control.

But elements like sprinklers that are on documents, you can clearly find out if you're going to take a space and upgrade the lighting. You can then confirm where all the sprinkler heads are to make sure that you don't create unnecessary conflict.

This is the warehouse portion that's getting converted into a drug manufacturing facility. This allows us to look at the structure, confirm that the framing of the roof is accurate. We asked Paul because this is a HeyDay space to take scans at two levels, one down at the normal level. What the software refers to as bird's eye.

You can see that the camera is actually mounted at a much higher level, and in this case, it's a warehouse. But there are projects where we use the bird's eye because it's even more important because it's not a warehouse. It may be an existing manufacturing space. It has an incredible amount of distribution of utility than services, and you're going to go in and perform a remodel.

If it's an older building, you are not going to be handed some BIM model that has everything three-dimensionally accounted for. You usually get two-dimensional auto CAS files. That's typically what's being delivered.

It's going to be a long time before we're in a world where BIM model is the norm and you're doing remodels and you have that luxury of having a model already established where everything is at, but this bird's eye setting allows us in very congested spaces to be able to see exactly where the conduits or ducts.

Again, this is the warehouse, so it's pretty wide open. But we've done projects where this tool becomes extremely helpful, and if you're doing design-build project, this gets shared by everybody on the team because they're all on board at the same time. The contractors and the architects and the design goals setting, the contractors are able to leverage this limiting amount of time.

They have to go off to that site and start to see what the utilities are. This is nice here you're able to see. It's scary what the conditions could be, but these are rolls of offices that were put in the warehouse as well as the restroom.
You can actually without having to get a ladder now, people go back and see how the frame is done to make sure that if you're going to modify it, that you would know what you'd have to do to meet code for the framing. But you could also see if there are any other utilities that are running above it without having to get a ladder or go into the rooms and pop the T-bar ceilings up.

On these slides you can see the amount of information allows you to do a visual coordination with everybody involved in the team. We usually ask Paul to capture the entire site because it allows us to go back and check everything that's out on that level, including the conditions of the elevations on the building, in terms of disconnects and other devices that are mounted on the site of the building that don't show up on drawing.

That you would typically go onto the site to have to know. You can just use this model to capture those things. If you're cutting it in a new opening, it allows you to in real-time as you're moving through the virtual reality model to see if you're going to cut a new opening to the building. How you would create the easiest path from the building out to the public right away to meet all of your code requirements.

[00:26:56]
Paul Collart: I apologize about the Internet. It isn't always behaving for me.

[00:27:01]
Jose Cotto: This is accessible parking that's there, so you can see the condition on the striping and painting to determine whether you need to upgrade that. But you could also check it against the California Building Code to make sure that it does have the latest requirements for the colors, the striping, the symbols, the signage, the verbiage on the signage.

You can see the curb cut there. Where the path is at, truncated domes. When you're looking at existing site, you need to find out whether they have all the truncated domes that they need. The things that you would normally spend a week at the beginning of the project going out to the site on multiple visits to capture all of this data, and again, the larger the site, the more work it's involved and our projects tend to be pretty large scale for tech companies.

They don't do work in 5000 square feet buildings. It can do work in anywhere from a 100-300,000 square foot buildings, and they have multi-purposes for what they use those buildings for. This tool starts to just give you endless amount of returns in terms of save time. Usually, we pick the back of the building and there's some requirements to convert loading docks into equipment firm enclosures to support the process on the inside.

Again, checking all of the paths around the building. Very useful to just move around the site and be able to use this.

[00:28:22]
Paul Collart: I thought there was a door there so I guess not.

[00:28:32]
Jose Cotto: You notice Paul was able to jump from one location to the site to another location on the site. Just by using the plan on the right and just be able to pick where each scan point was taken as it's represented by those circles. Just imagine you're walking the site this large. It's just time to get from one point to another, the roof.
All of these types of projects that we do for remodels, there is already the equipment that's on the roof when you determine whether their service years are reaching the end, and I'll get a lot of these buildings. It's common to find each back units that are anywhere from 10-15 years old and they're reaching the end of their life.

You usually have to replace them, this saves time by not having to go up on the roof and have to document it as a separate exercise. It's included as part of the model. You can see how the equipment is screened in order to meet planning department requirements, and if you're adding a new piece of equipment and you're trying to find an ideal location where you can set it on sleepers and not worry about disrupting current conduits or paths of travel to get around for maintenance.

You can save a lot of time using this model and taking a look at all of the conditions. But again, this is an example where not just the architect but the structural engineers looking at it to get an idea how the previous sleepers were done, we're going to touch an existing unit and replace it with a new unit to determine whether we can use some of the framings that's there. You're looking at the skylights.

You can look at the condition of the parapet and the roof screen. But the mechanical and plumbing contractors are also going to be using this to see the conditions of the units. They still going to run their test to see how the units run.

But you can get a pretty good visual on the condition of the unit based on this scan. -It is the thing if you tell Cupix what you want, they could take a shot, for instance, that's shown on this slide but they can also open the doors that lead into the components inside and take a shot of that, so they have the availability to do that.

This is an example of some of the mechanical rooms that contains some of the other guts for building that's doing research and development or manufacturing. These are the typical equipment you come across when you're dealing with tech companies and their facilities. You'll not only have the roof being utilized for this but you'll also have interior spaces that are utilized.

[00:30:54]
Paul Collart: An example, you get into these utilized spaces, you get into these technical spaces more data the better here. You want to be able to see more. This is also where other technologies just wouldn't be able to work. I'm going behind equipment here, we don't care how you hold that camera. It can be to the side, it can be on top as long as there's a line of sight. We can connect those. You can get into these crazy views where you could never imagine having a 360 image that's navigable and everything else. Again, helping those design consultant engineers.

[00:31:35]
Jose Cotto: Paul and I talked about that there was a shop that you saw on the control panel. Electrical panels and control panels, they usually have a schedule on the side of the door that tells you the circuit and how it's configured. Paul and I had this conversation about having the scan also include opening every electric panel and reading the schedule that's on the inside of the door that maintenance uses, but zooming up to it you be able to actually read that schedule. Just imagine the electrical design build contractor or engineer now saves a lot of time and you better look at that.

[00:32:08]
Paul Collart: That's also a new feature that we have with our software, which we didn't really get into with our new Capture app, if we have time we'll get into that a little bit later. But we have the ability to while you're in the field and sometimes, we're working with consumer-grade 360 cameras maybe can't read that very well. I can read some of it. But the ability that if while you're capturing, be able to use your iPhone with that picture and actually tag it while you're doing that capture in the field. Now you have that geo-located in your building so that you have this high res image of that available for everybody.

[00:32:50]
Jose Cotto: Great tool. You can't imagine how many contractors would be thanking you for taking the time before they came on board to get this all done and make it available to them when they started working with us.

[00:33:05]
Paul Collart: That was a very brief overview. I wanted to talk a little bit about just the benefits here. I am going to rely on Jose to talk about these because really it's him communicating the benefits to him and his entire team.

[00:33:23]
Jose Cotto: The first bullet item that you see on this slide that it talks about the benefits, was one of the first things we realized immediately. I'll give you an example we're located in Mountain View and we did a project for an electronics company that develops storage devices. They were located in South San Jose, which was approximately 45, 50 minute drive on the highway 101.

The building was 300,000 square feet. In the old days before we had something like CupixWorks available. If you've got a 300,000 square foot building and you are remodeling a 150,000 square feet of that, 50 percent of that building, it's going to get altered, gut it and redone because they are coming out with a new product line, for example, for their storage devices.

Those locations in the building could be anywhere within that 300,000 square feet. Just imagine all of you that have gone through this process, the number of times you'd have to walk through the site for visits during design to capture things as you start to discover more about what the scope is in terms of what it involve and as the extent of alterations gets further defined, you realize multiple times in the previous method that you had to go back out there because there were rooms that you didn't pay as much attention to.

You found out later on are going to actually get modified. An example I would like that you could have imagined during schematic design, you could visit that site on any given phase as many times as 10-15 times. Well, this model allows you to reduce it to one or two times. If I've got two people, because they both need to hold a tape measure and do the things they got to do. Or one part of the building and the other one is that another part of the building to save time.

Imagine the number of times it gets 10-15 minutes during a single design phase, you are driving out there 40 minutes each way. If the building is 300,000 square feet and in most of these buildings they are secured, it means you have to check in, get cleared through the lobby, and then get escorted to these areas because they are secured areas.

You were talking about three to four hours every time you visit. Three to four hours, half the work day. It's automatically lost every time you go to visit the site. This product allows you to cut it down to one or two visits for the things that you actually have to capture that the one percent measurement accuracy cannot be acceptable for some 88 dimensions for instance, you have to find out within an 1/8 inch tolerance whether you're compliant or not.

Those are the only things you really have to capture in the first two days, the one or two days you out there. You're not just taking that time that drives out there, you're seeing the time to walk through the building, to crawl through something, to climb up something. All of that is eliminated. There's that benefit.

When we start doing design, owner architect contractor meetings, OAC meetings, this model is automatically loaded at the start of every design meeting because it now becomes a point of discussion every time somebody raises an issue. Do we know what we're going to do for all of the electrical rooms? Whether we are going to be able to keep the switch teared up and while that person is making those comments, you are switching over to the model.

Everybody just latches onto the visual and it just makes the chances for miscommunicating on something much less likely. You are able to make decisions faster because you don't have that comment that comes up in a lot of OAC meetings. I'll confirm that for you. Let me go back out there after this meeting, find out whether we have the number of switched gears that we thought we had.

We also use this model for projects like this where it involves a lot of technical issues including the use of hazardous materials that are used during the process of fabrication for products. We usually have very schematic design or early in design development of preliminary meeting with the city, with the fire department, with the planning department and the building department.

We do an introduction, and in the old days you would bring preliminary drawings, you'd roll them on the table. You may have a few photos. Well, that's all gone by the wayside. We basically use this tool. We bring our laptop, we hook that up to their conference room display, and we actually go and walk them through it.

Now what's probably going to happen because the social distance thing here in the Bay Area, and that we're going to invite the city officials to a Zoom meeting, for example, and load this model. Walk it through, introduced the project to them. While you're introducing the project to them for preliminary feedback, you are walking them through a VR model.

The first time we did this, which was two years ago with a building official and a fire marshal, they were absolutely blown away. Because they were not trying to imagine what you were doing, they could see exactly what you're proposing to do. If they had questions about existing condition that we were touching those questions, they already knew what the answer were because they were looking at this model, so very helpful.

Another point I wanted to make is that we discovered early on and I was giving the feedback to Paul after the scan had been done. Hey Paul, this building is a 300,000 square feet facility, the facility's group for this company that manages the campus and this is like a 15 building campus in South San Jose. They started to realize, I can start using the other balance of the 150,000 square feet that they are not touching, automatically use it right away for facility's maintenance.

If someone called one of the facilities plumbers because the user complaint if there's a leak above one of the T-bar ceilings and water's coming through, they're able to find out exactly which unit of either a water heater or distribution piping is serving that room by going through this model and not have to walk out to the site to do that assessment.

They can do it here because they're all located in the facilities building, which might be 15 minutes away from the building that they need to go to because it's a massive campus. Right off the bat, all benefits were being realized when we started implementing these with all the members of the design team as well with people that are not involved in design but are using the facility on a day-to-day basis.

[00:39:22]
Paul Collart: Some statistics here on the Capture. It's a lot of area, main floor, the roof, the entire site, the warehouse. This constituted 14 hours onsite, over two hours. It's a lot of panoramic images. A lot of detail. But you can take a lot of panoramics really fast, and that's what's done.

It was what we would call an expert capture. Your average user isn't going to want to go out there and try to capture this much space. We didn't talk about Capture. I don't know if we'll have time to do that, but we have ways to capture and very flexible options so that people can go out there and capture on their own. That is something that we're introducing to CAS.

Actually the next slide is talk a little bit about CAS and how they approach these. But they're including that on their proposals of any significant size. I think with this self capture or what we call the DIY Capture, there's going to be scenarios where they don't need much detail, that they're going to be able to just go and do that on their own. I was proposing maybe you can to talk a little bit about your procedure on proposals and things like that.

[00:40:35]
Jose Cotto: - Yeah. A couple years ago well, after we did the initial projects with Paul, we realized that we didn't have to. There was a cost model that we first started using like three years ago with some of the other technologies where a update, for example, 300,000 square foot building, would take about three to four days to capture and would cost about $40,000.

This is pre cubics using some of the other models. Now this was one of the [inaudible 00:41:03] that we used, for a project that we had very large in the Bay Area. When Paul came along, it was a different type of technology, it didn't involve point Cloud and we didn't need to use a point Cloud, but it came along with the madness.

But with cubic since it was just the photo capture, we did a similar project, almost the same size, and it came out to about, can't remember Paul, something like $15,000 in two days to capture. Because it didn't involve a large trolley piece of equipment that someone had a wheel around, it was just a person with a construction hat with a camera mounted on behalf walking around with an iPhone, and capturing the space as they walked through.

The cost was one -third of what we had originally purchased. When we started using this technology for virtual reality models of the photographic conditions, we had to go to the client and get an initial buy off on using this because you just don't assume that the client's going to accept that you're going to spend $45, 50,000 in reimbursable cost to capture this.

We had to get approval and we were getting about 50 percent hit rate with clients as we would ask this. As we moved over to Cupix and we started seeing that the costs were anywhere from one- third to one-quarter of the cost that we were originally doing for these larger projects, we were thinking, okay, this is just part of our reimbursable, not submitting a fee of about $300,000-$0.5 million to do the design on this project, and I've got reimbursable costs of about $50-$60,000, and $10,000 of that is the [inaudible 00:42:40] photo capture for example.

I don't even bring it up in terms of getting approval, I just simply notify the client, this is one of the services we're incorporating, it's invaluable, we're going to use, we're just giving you the heads up. But at that point they're no longer considering, hey, you should run it by me first construct a lot of money, and it saves us a lot of time getting that approval.

[00:42:59]
Paul Collart: - Any advantage of sharing it with everybody?

[00:43:03]
Jose Cotto: - Absolutely. You've got a lot of skepticism because no one's actually experienced it firsthand, but once they do, I have yet to have a client look at me and say, this was a waste of money. I'm not sure what I got out of this [inaudible 00:43:15] .

[00:43:16]
Paul Collart: - Most people haven't experienced it on that such of a large scale. They might have seen it.

[00:43:23]
Jose Cotto: - Yeah.

[00:43:25]
Paul Collart: - Yeah. Unfortunately, this project that you had got canceled, so you never got to the point where you'd actually build this up into BIM? Sorry [inaudible 00:43:36] .

[00:43:37]
Jose Cotto: - There were two other projects that Paul and I were thinking of showing. I could not get the client to approve either of them because they were confidential in nature. They didn't not allow it to show them, so we ended up using a project and got canceled, but I didn't have to worry about.

[00:43:53]
Paul Collart: - Just very quickly because we're really beyond our limit here. This was a project, they were redesigning this lobby, they wanted this all on very detailed BIM, all they had were facilities drawings. I actually helped with this because it was an experiment of getting this into BIM. Is it practical to use this to design your BIM? I'm hired someone on that work, they did it all for about 24 hours of work, got this all into BIM model, which I can show you quickly.

The time on site to capture this was like 40 minutes, but it's not just the first floor, we modeled the first floor, the second floor, and even skylights. We did this all just from taking dimensions from the 3 tour. You can see the resulting model that came out of Revit, which is just brought into the system, and actually I can also show you the bird's eye view.

They modeled this entire area up here from photography and taking measurements. Not sure, Jose, you would have gone to this type of detail, but this project, because it was a fantastic went a little out of control in terms of people asking for details, but we were happy to oblige because we knew what we do.

[00:45:15]
Jose Cotto: - It is not inconceivable to have a client who's asking you to do a remodel. Not necessarily about technical manufacturing space, but the lobby or an executive briefing center. At that point, the architectural scrutiny of remodeling in an existing space. It's got a higher level. It does happen. It wouldn't be invaluable to have this tool. Yeah.

[00:45:38]
Paul Collart: - Yeah. I actually have those details here. Then I do have a technology comparison. Again, we don't have a lot of time, we're going to have to cut this short. I mentioned earlier that there's cases where Cupix just really, it's not a good solution.

There's going to be cases, I think CAS is a company they would consider Pharaoh Leica laser scanning, which I know you have done projects with that type of terrestrial laser scanning, and you've also done laser lidar scanning, and I know early on you would use hollow builder, but I think you're able to see really quickly the differences in terms of what we're able to do for you, in terms of really helping you with your bed models and everything else. Now I've had other slides here, but I'm going to have to call it quits here.

Really there's two calls the action here is to, if anybody's interested in being involved in doing your own captures, feel free to reach out and we'll reach out to you, and if you need help with a capture, let us know. We have service providers around the country that we can call upon and do something similar in terms of how CAS architects out sources their search I preserve. Anything else? [inaudible 00:47:05]

[00:47:08]
Jose Cotto: - No. They're captured here. I just did want to know there are a couple of questions that people put in the chat Window that you might want to take a look at. [inaudible 00:47:15]

[00:47:21]
Paul Collart: - [inaudible 00:47:22] the question, how long it took to capture that site? It was about 14 hours on site, not including travel to get to the site over a couple days. I had mentioned using the iPhone and tagging again, that's part of the site capture. In the process really is as you're capturing, the assumption is that you have what we call project templates, something I didn't get into.

But your project is pre-set up. We take cues from rabbit in terms of how we set up projects in which you configure levels, you have elevations, you have reference plans, figure the reference plans similar to a viewport in rabbit. You use that as a template when you go on site with our capture app to capture that data so that when it goes up to the Cloud, everything's already pre-located.

But you can also use that reference plan to tag those photographs on the plan also, so that you're automatically tagging with your iPhone photos. Another feature that we've added with this Cupix works. But I apologize, we're not getting to all these questions. Feel free to reach out to us anytime we're happy to answer any other questions and go into further detail.

Lastly, just a big thanks to Jose. You were really the star of the show and that-.

[00:48:48]
Jose Cotto: - It was my pleasure.

[00:48:49]
Paul Collart: - I won't say how many years but that experience in architecture, we don't need to go into the number of years. Okay. Thank you, everyone, and we're going to make this recording available to you all, so feel free to reach out and if you want a copy of that and shared amongst your colleagues. Thank you. Thanks Jose.

[00:49:15]
Jose Cotto: - Thank you guys. Have a good weekend.