Dalux, Denmark-based company that does building information modeling, Wednesday launched an augmented-reality phone app designed to give construction workers an edge.

The so-called BIM platform, intended to assist construction crews in the field by providing visual overlays via mobile phone camera as well as floor plans, is currently being used in Denmark’s Faroe Islands to assist with the construction of an extension for the national hospital there.

According to Dalux’s blog, the construction crew on the ground is using the augmented-reality mobile platform to increase coordination and task management to meet the demands for timely construction completion.

Sonni Seyer, information and communications technology coordinator on the construction project, said that using Dalux helped “save all parties time and pain and [prevent] many unnecessary conflicts.”

The project will build a state-of-the-art care facility wing onto the Faroe Islands National Hospital with complex automated systems for heating, plumbing, waste management and laundry. The project is expected to cost 500 million DKK ($77.1 million USD) and be ready by February 2021.

The newly released version of Dalux’s app, called Dalux TwinBIM, provides an augmented-reality capability. Running the app on a phone, crew members can stand on site, point a mobile device’s camera at a wall, window or other feature and will “see” a virtual overlay of expected construction.

“Our new TwinBIM technology blends the digital and physical world,” said Brent Dalgaard Larsen, founding partner and chief technology officer at Dalux. “A new augmented reality where the boundaries between the digital and the physical are effaced … Using your smartphone or tablet, TwinBIM simply merges your BIM model into your real-time physical environment, allowing you to see and interact with it.”

Construction and architectural design firms already use a great deal of 3-D modeling in order to understand work sites and convey information to supervisors and workers in the field. Much of this information must be translated through a 2-D screen – be it on a workstation in an office, a tablet in the hands of a foreman or a rugged smartphone toted by a worker placing drywall or pulling wire. AR provides a way to keep 3-D models in a 3-D perspective.

Translating information from 2-D back to 3-D sometimes leaves a little room for error (what goes in front of what or on top of what?) but in the same way that seeing is believing, with AR seeing is communicating.

For Dalux’s platform, AR is another tool in the construction expert’s belt designed to make workers’ jobs and administrative duties easier.

Image: Dalux