Concept3D Inc., a maker of interactive map software, immersive 3-D tours and virtual reality 3-D modeling for data, today announced the integration of operational data from OSIsoft LLC’s PI System, an enterprise data infrastructure provider.

Operational data from business that’s connected to campuses, factories and office buildings can quickly become a confused jumble without a way to present it. Concept3D’s software uses 3-D modeling and virtual reality to bring assets and data into a navigable digital format.

The company seeks to provide clients a competitive edge through applications such as data visualization, wayfinding and immersive VR-enabled virtual tours. Current clients include convention centers and event spaces, data centers, healthcare and retirement facilities, large commercial sites, resorts, hotels, theme parks and universities.

With this integration, users will be able to use VR to view data generated from physical locations – through sensors, employees or databases – using Concept3D’s system from anywhere in the world with an interactive and immersive virtual reality map.

“The power of the Concept3D platform is intuitive data access and visualization,” said Robert Johnson, vice president of business development at Concept3D. “The PI System is well-known as the standard in making operational data usable and accessible to industrial companies, and the integration makes it possible to add a visual, geographic element to complement PI System data.”

OSIsoft’s PI System can capture and organize massive amounts of operational data from equipment — sensors, power supplies, manufacturing tools, turbines and other configurable streaming analytics – and serves it up in a digestible format. The software behind the PI system makes operational data accessible enough that it can be acted upon by both experts on the plant floor and business users in the boardroom.

According to OSIsoft, its platform is licensed in 65 percent of Fortune 500 industrial companies and captures data from 1.5 billion sensors at more than 19,000 sites across 127 countries. OSIsoft serves nine primary markets including oil and gas, utilities, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, metals and mining, pulp and paper, and chemicals. The company intends to expand into transportation, data centers and discrete manufacturing.

Craig Harclerode, industry principal of oil and gas at OSIsoft, said Concept3D will give PI System clients “a highly visual, geographic way to access and view their data” and that it will be built atop “a unique and powerful system for operational data integration, normalization, analytics and visualization.”

Concept3D takes physical locations and makes them virtual by using blueprints, photography and video to recreate the space in detail allowing visitors and employees to immerse themselves in the location. Then, data collected and formatted by OSIsoft can be overlaid onto the virtual representation in a way that makes the data easier to understand and interact with.

For example, a manufacturing plant could have each of its buildings display information as numbers, bars or icons to show the number of employees, power usage, production, efficiency or any number of other data points. That could be used by a manager on the campus to better understand where to shift resources or as part of a presentation during a meeting on business intelligence.

With the ability to immerse viewers in a VR landscape, locations become more real and the data attached to them can be granulated down to per campus, per building, per room or potentially even areas of manufacturing floor or individual equipment, depending on the scale and detail of the virtual experience. As a result, bottlenecks can be more easily visualized in industrial processes and systems can be better understood in the space that they exist by having equipment, buildings and data displayed side-by-side.

Image: Concept3D