Bentley Be Inspired 2011: i-models get the iPad treatment; point-cloud gets the spotlight

This week, heavyweights in the infrastructure market are gathering in Amsterdam, the Dutch homeland famous for tulips, windmills, and wooden clogs. They've flown in for Bentley Systems' Be Inspired 2011 conference, an annual event that culminates in a gala dinner and an award ceremony. Bentley launched the by-invitation only event to recognize projects that represent "outstanding achievement and innovation in infrastructure design, construction, and operations."

But in the pre-show talks, held yesterday with 70 members of the media who had flown in for the event, Bentley paid homage to an outstanding achievement by Apple: the iPad. The lightweight multi-touch tablet fathered by the late Steve Jobs, as it turned out, is about to become much more prevalent in the greasy fieldwork of plant managers, wastewater facility supervisors, roadway designers, and structural engineers.

iWares for iDevices

Bentley's iWare module family now includes three apps for iPod, iPhone, and iPad users:

• i-model optimizer for iPad (to convert DGN, Revit, DWG, DXF, Rhino, and 3DS files into an i-model optimized for the iPad);
• ProjectWide i-model packager (to group i-models optimized for iPad together with other documents into a single package); and
• structural synchronizer view for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch (to view and explore your 3D structural models created with Structural Synchronizer V8i)

Of these three, the first two are in beta; the last one is still in development.

The collection of apps makes i-model, Bentley's preferred lightweight format for visualizing integrated infrastructure projects, easily accessible for markup, annotation, and data exchange for field crews equipped with Apple devices.

In addition, Bentley also offers Bentley Navigator and Bentley ProjectWise Explorer, both available for the iPad. Working in conjunction, the two apps let users perform walk-throughs inside 3D infrastructure models, inspect predesignated points of interest, view attached documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, and so on), and add notes and highlights.

With the latest partnership with Adobe and Bluebeam Software, Bentley plans to add more security, read/right controls, and digital rights management tools to 3D PDF documents associated with i-models.

Transmitting through the Cloud

Among the announcements made yesterday was Bentley's new partnership with Microsoft, which is expected to let Bentley ProjectWise and AssetWise users use Windows Azure-powered transmittal services.

Bhupinder Singh, senior VP of Bentley Software, noted, "Most of our users have invested significant resources on manual processes or enterprise systems to handle the crucial task ... Unfortunately, most generic approaches aren't well suited for this infrastructure project need."

The long awaited function can now be performed right inside Bentley's ProjectWide collaboration and AssetWise management environments, according to the announcement. The collection of services will enable "AECO (architecture, engineering, construction, and operation) organizations to accurately and securely package, and deliver, receive, and track transmittals through a dashboard portal," the company revealed.

Pointcloud Streaming in the Cloud

Bentley's recent shopping spree resulted in the acquisition of Pointools, which specializes in streaming large point cloud datasets. (Think of it as using Google Maps' on-demand map streaming approach for point cloud databases.)

As Bentley's Singh puts it, "A unique new ProjectWide capability will stream on-demand to Bentley applications only the subset of point cloud data being viewed or queried. This function is what has been needed to allow point clouds to fulfill their potential as an intrinsic, fundamental data type in information modeling workflows."

Because of point cloud database size in infrastructure projects, mobile devices with limited storage and memory are not always suitable for interacting with the data set. With on-demand streaming, Bentley is poised to overcome the hurdle to deliver point cloud data to mobile platforms. This will allow a plant worker to, for example, turn on the location sensors in an iPad, then conduct a walk-through of a site captured in point cloud and CAD data using his mobile device as a virtual window -- even though the actual site may be thousands of miles away.

With mobile apps and lightweight clients providing visualization and editing functions, Bentley envisions ProjectWise and AssetWise to become information hubs where collaborators' actions get synchronized.

"Everything is connected wirelessly. Ultimately, the opportunity is for us to build a semantic city, where everything talk to each other," said Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley. "Thank goodness we don't have to invent [the device needed]. We just need to apply it."

Be Inspired conference continues throughout the week with customer presentations and jury reviews of finalists.