Virtually FREE Virtual Reality - Thanks Google

Just imagine. You have your model available to your construction team on everything from their laptops, to tablets, to their phones. But it's not very viewable on a small screen. A tablet or a workstation in the office trailer are better options. But your workers need the information where they work, and carrying around a tablet is bothersome and easy to damage on a construction site. You can print out some drawings, but that doesn't fully utilize the 3D design.

Enter Google Cardboard. No, we're not printing drawings on cardboard. Google Cardboard is an ingenious idea that brings virtual reality to your phone. I've written before about VR Glasses such as Google Glass being used to bring your model alive in the real world. But again – expensive, easily damaged, cumbersome unless they make a safety glasses version for construction.

The cardboard idea takes a simple pattern you download, transfer to cardboard, cut and fold – use and throw away. You could have a stack of the things unfolded waiting for your workers to grab one as needed for virtually no cost. You fold it, slide your phone in, hold it up to your face, and you are seeing your model in 3D virtual reality. It can even be location and movement sensitive using your phone's GPS and tilt.

So here is the scenario. You send a fresh model to your worker in the field via email, or post it to the cloud. Your worker pulls out a cell phone, slips it into the cardboard box, and can look around at the model with a perspective based on their current location. Okay, that pipe you just moved in the model is intersecting a duct which is already in place on site. Your worker snaps a pic and texts it to you.

Now that brings up another possibility. Say in your rendering app you use the phone's camera to allow an overlay of the actual condition with the model. That would only take a slight modification of the Google Cardboard box to uncover the camera lens. Now you are looking through the camera, and at the model, synchronized in real time using a CELL PHONE and a CARDBOARD BOX!

Imagine the possibilities! And all with the cell phone your worker already has, the software you already use, and a free box you cut and folded from an old piece of cardboard destined for the recycle bin. Check out Google Cardboard and play around with it. People are already coding games for the thing. This could revolutionize how we work, and you heard it here first.