How Introducing 360 Photo Documentation Makes It Faster to Capture Your Site

Construction is hard. We know this. Margins are slim, deadlines are tight, and labor is scarce. The last thing any project manager wants to think about is how they’re going to get photographs taken of their job site in order to document progression of the project over time. 

If you’ve ever talked to an entry-level field engineer or intern in the construction industry, they’ll tell you how tedious and time-consuming it is to walk around, take hundreds of pictures on their phone, and then manually organize them to match the floorplan of the building.

And yet, photo documentation is essential to any project. We can’t just eliminate it from the process. Construction professionals need photos in order to have a logged record of completed work for billing purposes, to coordinate between design and construction teams to make sure the as-built data matches the design data and to protect themselves when change orders arise or in the event of litigation by subcontractors or owners.

What if Machine Learning and AI could streamline the 360 photo documentation process to keep builders focused on actually building? At OpenSpace, this is our vision. We build time machines for construction sites. Since all construction workers are required to wear a hard hat on site, we simply built a magnetic mount that can hold a 360 camera, which passively captures the entire site as workers do their normal daily site walks. Then, our backend software ingests all of that data and produces a Google Street View-style walkthrough of your job site, which project stakeholders can virtually visit online to understand current conditions.

We want to automate the boring and labor-intensive parts of construction so workers can focus on what brings them joy — actually building! If you would like to see our 360 photo documentation software in action, you can sign up for a demo.