Attended an interesting talk at the London Bentley offices that showcased the work being done at West Cambridge last week. I suppose that given that only a small percentage of the building stock would be under construction each year and an even smaller percentage of those projects would have much in the way of a BIM model... the bulk of the information that a Digital Twin would be scanned information of existing assets.
This is a lot of work and requires a lot of processing... which will of course come down as the tech improves. But looking at the high-end kit still required for ContextCapture processing and Lidar scanners, profileration is going to be slow and limited to high value sites. WB is a test case, but I doubt that there will be many plant rooms that would be scanned and merged with the SCADA / Building Maintenance System any time soon.
OTOH, tech can move quickly. Interesting use of Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK to produce streaming video+depth content via Youtube.
I can see this being a lot more workable. Instead of scanning the whole plantroom. You would get most of the benefit of the WB ContextCapture model by using a Kinect camera. Wifi-power socket extender combined with a small app on the computer on site would provide the link to Youtube. Most bits of kit would have read outs anyway which can be read via the feed. No need to scan, process, register etc any photos or point clouds. any additional info will probably be available at the facilities managers workstation and can be relayed using his phone, if necessary.
And you get real time up-to-date view of the kit. Not just what was there when the plantroom was scanned.... which won't be updated very often.
I wonder if the streaming data can be overlaid with imodels or LumenRT models? The vid clip above shows the 3d Kinect model overlaid over the phone camera's video feed. The video feed could be replaced/merged with a view of the i.model / LumenRT model? This would allow a previously scanned or constructed model to provide the wider context. Hololens or Xbox controls to provide access to any easter eggs to more information?
DCW is looking at continuous surveying as one of its areas of investigation. Continuous surveying is relavant to recent interest in documenting sub-surface utilities in UK and elsewhere. Combined with OpenGround?
For utilities inspections, you could wonder around on site and call up the recordings of the excavation 'under your feet', not just the 3d model which will only provide 'intent', not as built information.