Register now to attend November’s BIM Show Live for Manufacturers

Today, BIM.Technologies can excitedly unveil the third and final of this year's BIM Show Lives. This one has a very specific, very significant purpose.

BIM Show Live for Manufacturers represents a fantastic springboard for the nation’s manufacturers to acquaint themselves with BIM. The organisers have amassed a typically strong array of speakers to educate manufacturers on the palpable strengths of BIM, with each succinct 45-minute talk with only one audience in mind.

And since this is a BIM Show Live event, it will follow a familiar template. The four topics making up the template are Define & Validate; Design & Prototype; Manufacture & Assemble; and Operate & Maintain. Over the course of one day, we’ll guide attendees through the entire process, transforming abstract concepts into easily understood ideas. To help with that, we’ve set aside time for a closing Q&A session for any lingering queries.

BIM is helping to dramatically improve building projects across the world. When fully BIM literate, firms are able to better communicate and coordinate both internally and externally. This isn't just an undertaking for architects and construction firms, but for manufacturers, too.

The Space Group stable of businesses, which includes BIM.Technologies, are at the forefront of this movement, and our bimstore division, which runs a UK-leading library full of manufacturer-specific BIM objects, have stepped forward as the day’s sponsors.

We’ve booked out the Building Centre in London for this event, which will take place on the 20th of November. You can state your interest here. The designated hashtag for the night's Twitter-based discussion is #BSL4M.

And the Lend Lease Award for Innovation goes to... BIM.Tech and friends!

For a good while now, BIM.Technologies has been involved in the enormous North Wales Prison project, a 2,100-person facility designated by the government as a trial project for its 2016 Level 2 BIM mandate. Such a large undertaking is a job for multiple parties, so as Information Manager we are in constant dialogue with our colleagues as we determine the project's overall BIM strategy.

Things seem to be going rather well, given that the entire project team last week received the Award for Innovation at Lend Lease's Public Sector Awards. Olly Thomas was representing us at the event, and can be seen below, stood dead centre.


North Wales is an exacting project that requires precise teamwork. It's for that reason that we'd like to commend the other firms involved for their work so far.

Great work, all!

Our TRON moment: BIM.Technologies is working on the Oculus Rift

So, Space Group CEO Rob Charlton, what do you think of version 2 of the Oculus Rift development kit now that you've had a turn?


That's a thumbs up, we think.
 

And you, Paul Broadfoot? What do you think of the ability to walk around a building, checking it for design flaws and other irregularities, before work has even started on site? Because that's precisely what BIM.Technologies is aiming for in its experiments with the hardware. Work's already started converting one of our BIM-enabled projects into a full-size model the user can move around in. You like that?

Another thumbs up

Like Google Glass, Space Group sees Oculus Rift as a vehicle for change in the construction industry. With it, architects can now examine their proposals inside out. Walking around the virtual form of a building allows us to gauge its more intangible elements - like atmosphere - meaning we can make changes based on our experiences inside the headset.

Using the Rift in conjunction with existing software, we hope to further reduce risk and waste, and we're not averse to having fun whilst doing it. Space Group's _space Architects division was the first architectural business to only deliver information in 3D, and in purchasing a Rift we intend to be among the first to scope out the new possibilities presented to us.

It's worth enthusing, too, about just how absorbing a few minutes spent in the Rift can be. Our early sojourns into virtual reality have seen us strut around spaceships, awed by the images of space in the cockpit. Obviously, the projects we'll be working on are grounded in reality, and an amble through the corridors of a real-world building was, whilst not as fantastical, still popular.

We'll bring you more news on our grand adventure with the Rift soon. Excited for that, BIMcrunch Editor Jack White?

Yep...

BIMcrunch v2 launched - interviews with BIM.Tech personnel to come

Our Space Group sibling BIMcrunch has gone live with its new site, which re-colours, rejigs, and refreshes many of the news portal's features. It's been designed from the get-go to be an essential resource to everyone in the BIM trade, making it worthy of a place in your bookmarks bar.

More information on the new iteration of BIMcrunch can be found here and here.

BIM.Tech is particularly excited at all this because, this week, you can expect the first ever "Crunch Time" with our Technology Director Adam Ward, a two-minute interview that deals in snappy answers. Very fun.

Autumn 2014 issue of Level Three goes to press

Work has finished on the latest issue of Level Three, the BIM.Technologies magazine that zeroes in on the projects which our BIM consultancy division has applied its expertise to over the past year. Watch out for updates on North Wharf Road, which serves as our cover star, as close to a pin-up as a BIM can get.


Click for a far larger version

In this edition, to be sent out to our partners and associates next week, we interview James Pellatt of Great Portland Estates. James is Head of Projects at the London-based developer, making his thoughts on BIM especially relevant and especially worthy of examination.

We also partake in a bit of storytelling, with a summary of COBie's history, and an overview of how we tackle the process at BIM.Technologies. Olly Thomas walks us through his role as an Information Manager, and we recap BIM Show Live 2014, BIM.Tech's biggest, grandest event to date.

At yesterday's Meet the Hospital Bidders event, we handed out advance copies of the mag. serving as a companion to Olly's speech on the strengths of BIM.

Check back next week for some more BIM.Technologies news, which came too late to sneak into Level Three.

We're sponsoring Birmingham City Council's Meet the Hospital Bidders event

Now that BIM.Technologies is active in the Midlands, we've started to get involved with the region's regular industry events.

'Meet the Hospital Bidders' is a day-long conference jointly organised by the Sandwell and Birmingham City councils, its purpose to promote the robust supply chain infrastructure of the West Midlands to hospital construction teams both national and international.

A free event which has attracted the likes of Balfour Beatty and Laing O'Rourke, MtHB comes soon after planning permission was granted to the Midland Metropolitan hospital, a £353m development located in Smethwick.

BIM.Technologies is proud to be a sponsor of tomorrow's event, and we're happier still to be appearing on stage. Our Information Manager Olly Thomas is to give a speech alongside bimstore's Gill Smith on BIM's importance to the future of the health sector.

Around 100 exhibitors have registered to attend, with keynote speeches scheduled throughout the day. MtHB takes place at Bethel Convention Centre in West Bromwich from 8:30am onwards, lasting until 03:00pm.

See BIMcrunch's article for more details.

What we can do for you – 240 Blackfriars

If you're the head of a property developer and you have the chance to make a £4.5m saving on a project, would you investigate further? BIM offered exactly that sort of reduction in cost to Great Portlands Estates on its recently completed 240 Blackfriars development. And by recruiting BIM.Technologies, Space Group's BIM consultancy division, GPE had someone to guide things along.

Blackfriars was one of BIM.Technologies' first "mega-projects". It's a mammoth 19-storey office block in London which is already renting its nine top floors to United Business Media. Designers AHMM have achieved a genuine one person per eight-square feet floorplan, creating a building that looks good and works well.

BIM.Technologies was faced with some unique challenges during the course of their work. There was, for instance, a rooftop plant room to consider - backward compared to most buildings. But because BIM.Tech are specialists in their field, they were able to create the architectural BIM that was subsequently aligned with the structural and services design models to form a coordinated project BIM.

Great Portland Estates estimates that for every pound funnelled into BIM, they saved two pounds in the contract sum.

Part of this can be credited to the 4D time-lining features of BIM, which effectively gives construction firms the ability to "rehearse" their work, checking in advance for errors in logistics or sequencing.

The completion of 240 Blackfriars is one of BIM.Tech's biggest milestones to date, but we have other mega-projects still to come, such as Google's London Headquarters.

More information on how BIM.Technologies helped shape the Blackfriars project can be found on the consultancy's website.

BIM.Tech's Olly Thomas to speak at the Constructing the BIM Team Conference

In our profession, disseminating complex information and explaining it to an audience takes real talent. This coming Tuesday, the 9th of September, one of BIM.Technologies' Information Managers will be demonstrating that flair with a talk at FutureFit's "Constructing the BIM Team Conference" in Crawley.

At the Arora Hotel, Olly Thomas is to give a concise account of the "Information Delivery Cycle” section of PAS1192-2:2013, the specification for information management on the capital/ delivery phase of BIM-enabled construction projects.

The presentation focuses on the information exchange and decision point requirements of the BIM process, breaking down the Information Delivery Cycle into manageable chucks to aid understanding of how operates.

Olly will be on stage twice over the course of the one-day event. After his 15:10 lecture, he'll appear again as a guest speaker at the closing Q&A panel.

BIM.Technologies sets up shop in the Midlands

On Friday, our BIM.Technologies division edged closer to becoming a truly nationwide practice with the official opening of a new office down in the Midlands - Rugby, to be exact. This one's a real beauty.

 

The Victorian era Regent Court must be the oldest property we've ever resided in. It's a handsome three-storey building, not far at all from the town's beloved Caldecott Park. It was once owned by the De Rokeby family, from whom Rugby gets its name.

Altogether, the building comprises of eight suites and a basement meeting room.

As was the case in Edinburgh, we're renting one of one of the suites within Regent Court after an increase in work within the region and neighbouring areas.

Olly Thomas, Information Manager at BIM.Tech and office lead of this new Rugby department said: "This move allows us to service existing clients whilst building new relationships over the coming months with a mind to expanding in the near future".

Case study updates now live on site

Keeping the official site of BIM.Technologies up to date is, logic dictates, a never-ending process; we take on new projects all the time, and are dogged in our perusal of new tools. Warboard, for instance, is a game-changing utility that we developed in house. We really ought to talk about that soon.

As part of our on-going effort to provide visitors with comprehensive case studies of our past and current projects, we have added photos to our Greenwich Peninsula, City Road, and Vauxhall Sky Garden pages. These case studies are our most effective method of conveying what BIM consultancy actually consists of, and photos of BIMs help to contextualise the field.

Check back soon for more incremental updates to the site.

BIM.Technologies starts tinkering with Google Glass

BIM.Technologies has recently come into possession of a Google Glass developer kit, which has been as coveted as you'd expect. In a period of three hours after its unboxing it was worn by at least six different people in the office. The phrase “OK Glass” ricocheted around the building, only falling quiet when it was stashed away from prying eyes.

The reason for our new acquisition is that we're capitalising on Google’s wearable technology by developing an app which will help in facilities management and operation. The unique augmented vision features of the device have immense potential in helping architects and construction workers.

On site, as an example, facilities management operators will be able to identity pieces of equipment instantly, and pull up relevant data. As an information business, this is incredibly exciting for us.

Our Technology director Adam Ward, who attended this year's Revit Gunslingers, is leading Space Group’s research into Glass’s many other potential uses in the construction industry. Over the next few weeks, he’ll be getting to grips with the device’s eccentricities.

We’ll be sure to update the outside world on our experiments with the development kit, so check back with us soon.

BIM Show Live Scotland this month

The UK’s leading BIM conference is heading to one of Edinburgh’s most prestigious arts venues for an evening of dialogue, thought, and visions of the future.

 

Founded by Space Group in 2011, BIM Show Live attracts delegates from across architectural & construction spectrums for a lively exchange of ideas and experiences. Past events have taken place in London and Manchester, and now a leaner BSL is landing in Scotland to help galvanise the country’s construction industry towards full-scale adoption of BIM.

Extra impetus for this has been provided by the Scottish government, who have mandated that all new-build construction projects across the public sector in Scotland should be BIM level 2 compliant by 2017. It is therefore crucial for the industry in Scotland to have access to the same level of invaluable networking opportunities as exists in England.

BIM.Technologies, who earlier this year established a new office in the capital, have partnered with BIM Hub Scotland to organise this agenda-setting event, to be held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Edinburgh’s High Street. Over the course of the evening, the conference will examine the current adoption of building information modelling within the UK and the potential challenges and benefits to Scotland.

BIM Show Live Scotland will be held on the 24^th of July, from 4.00-8.00pm.

With numbers limited, we advise heading to the registration form right away.

BIM.Technologies jets off to Boston to test Revit

This week, our Technology Director Adam Ward is back in America, taking up the Revit Gunslinger mantle.

Gunslingers is Autodesk‘s way of soliciting valuable feedback from Revit’s most advanced users on its work-in-progress features. The invite lists are tiny, at around 15 attendees per event, so for Adam to be invited along testifies to his great expertise with the software.

In fact, Adam’s a regular at Gunslinger events. After November 2011′s gathering, we asked him to write about his impressions of what went on: “It was great to meet with some of the biggest Revit geeks on the planet,” he wrote, praising Autodesk as “fantastic hosts”.

That’s about all he could write, though. Because the software on show at Gunslingers is in such a nascent stage, Autodesk impose numerous NDA agreements onto the event, allowing its developers to discreetly eliminate any bugs or design shortcomings before the newest updates go public.
Back in the UK, the rest of BIM.Technologies are hard at work on their on-going projects.

Victoria Gate is looking for a groundbreaker

Victoria Gate, a new landmark retail development in Leeds, is one of the more heavyweight projects in the BIM.Technologies portfolio.

We were chosen by construction firm Sir Robert McAlpine to enhance the project with our unbeatable BIM coordination, helping to deliver a detailed virtual model of the proposed site. A complex design, it draws on Leeds' proud history in textiles by creating buildings that look like they really do have "texture".

Now, as Victoria Gate fast approaches its construction phase, property developer Hammerson is asking residents of the city to nominate unsung heroes who have "played a key part in Leeds’ thriving community" for a very special role. The chosen candidate will push the button on the piling rig that starts the build of the flagship John Lewis department store - the first of its kind in Leeds.

It is great for us at BIM.Technologies to see what an impact Victoria Gate is already having on Leeds. The city is one of four that we have offices in around the north of England, and we feel very much invested in the city's future.

You can read more details about the groundbreaker opportunity on the Victoria Gate site, while the future shopping centre's Twitter feed hosts a number of photos of the construction process so far.

Greetings from Edinburgh!

Exciting times for the BIM.Technologies crew this week, as we opened a new office in Edinburgh, putting us closer to our Scottish clients than ever before.

We’re the latest tenants of the bustling TechCube, a shared office facility where technology and the arts come together in an eclectic mix. This new outpost for BIM.Technologies is headed by Ryan Tennyson.

As a result of our expansion into Scotland, there's a new blip on the "Contact Us" map of the British Isles.

Space Group’s CEO Rob Charlton states that BIM.Technologies will be heavily involved in the proliferation of BIM via this new Scottish hub. “We also plan to bring BIM Show Live to Edinburgh and Scotland in the summer to spread the word,” he said.