Yesterday, at DroneDeploy Conference 2020, we announced a new way to capture and analyze your job site. During the keynote, we unveiled 360 Walkthrough, a solution that finally gives executives, field teams, and stakeholders unlimited perspectives entirely in DroneDeploy’s comprehensive platform. This unveiling marks a new chapter for DroneDeploy: we’re moving beyond the sky and into complete site capture – interior and exterior, any angle, any altitude – with the same simplicity and power our platform offers. With 360 Walkthrough, you can capture and upload a 360 video on the ground, and process and analyze it all within our platform. You'll get complete documentation and monitoring of every part of your site - inside and out.
Let’s take a closer look at what 360 Walkthrough can do for you.
Challenges
A construction project can face a multitude of hurdles:
- It can be challenging to verify work has been done – and, perhaps most importantly, done correctly.
- Projects can meet varying degrees of rework.
- The speed at which tasks are completed can be long and laborious.
- Disputes may occur between teams over verification of work.
360 Walkthrough all but eliminates these obstacles.
Tracking Progress
Tracking daily progress requires hours of work, and adequately documenting issues or safety concerns can be tricky. Many companies captured issues through traditional methods, including phones, iPads, and even paper and pen. These methods are not only inefficient, the areas of concern aren’t geotagged to a location. This means that even after capturing site data, it is difficult to find the location again, decipher the data, and distribute it to relevant stakeholders. To an extent, it’s almost like working blind.
With 360 Walkthrough, anyone can walk a job site using any 360 camera and then quickly upload and process within DroneDeploy. Companies can process their data in less than 15 minutes and share the virtual walkthrough with stakeholders who never need to go on-site, cutting down on unnecessary travel costs while simultaneously keeping workers safe.
Validating Work
Superintendents rely on precise information to ensure teams are working correctly, and the project is being built as designed. In daily planning meetings, if there is an absence of accurate information about any on-site issue or a lack of visual review progress, superintendents have to resolve disputes and validate plans, ultimately causing delays and likely a loss of revenue.
360 Walkthrough allows you to validate work and check progress easily. By overlaying your projects’ exterior or interior plans to match your 360 camera walkthrough and drone map, you can also easily add a design plan, indoor floor plan, and contours to your project. With every aspect of your project housed in one place, superintendents can regularly validate work to keep everyone on track. Everyone working from the same information – in the same solution – helps avoid costly missteps.
Inspections & Improved Communication
One of the most beneficial aspects of 360 Walkthrough is your ability to perform virtual inspections. 360 Walkthrough makes it easy for any employee to walk a site and conduct a remote inspection. Simply navigate between your 360 videos or dates to see progress, compare two points in time to find and identify issues, and then share issue reports to keep all team members informed. Virtual inspections not only keep workers safe, but it also ensures all employees are working from the same information – a sole source of truth represented in one digital reconstruction.
Collaboration and communication are two of 360 Walkthrough’s foundations, allowing you to bring your site anywhere in the world. Since project managers can’t always be on-site, it can cause headaches for the rest of the team. For example, if there is an issue or change order, the project manager needs to understand where the project is today and estimate the change’s cost and timeframe. Unfortunately, if there is no clear site documentation, the change order can add delays and often results in miscommunication across multiple parties.
360 Walkthrough also allows you to tag users while adding issue tags and comments. All issues are added to the issue report, allowing companies to build trust with executives and clients by sharing each project’s site reality. This level of communication improves project planning and coordination between the office and field teams.
DroneDeploy’s 360 Walkthrough ingests and processes 360 photos and videos and allows you to visualize your drone data in one workflow – connecting each and every inch of the exterior and interior data from your job site. By providing this 360 tour of a project, executives, stakeholders, and employees can easily view progress, conduct a remote inspection, and assist in planning. DroneDeploy, with the addition of 360 Walkthrough, is streamlining how companies execute their operations, saving thousands of dollars in budget spend, all while keeping workers safe and accounted for.
