November 10th, 2021
On November 2nd, 2021, OpenSpace welcomed more than 250 construction professionals from across the industry and across the world for our first annual virtual customer conference, Waypoint 2021. This interactive event provided an opportunity for the OpenSpace team to announce new products and features, share best practices from customers, and engage in conversation with members of the community.
If you weren’t able to attend Waypoint, here’s a recap of all the highlights from the conference:
The opening session provided the perfect opportunity to share the latest news on our products and tools designed exclusively for the AEC industry. OpenSpace CEO Jeevan Kalanithi opened the summit by welcoming attendees and encouraging members of our growing community to use the event as an opportunity to learn from each other.
Next, Jessica Stewart, Product Manager at OpenSpace, kicked off the day’s product announcements, starting with the official launch of 3D Scans, which is now the industry’s fastest way to get a measurable three-dimensional scan within two inches of accuracy. If you are an OpenSpace customer, all you need is a LiDAR-enabled tablet or smartphone to scan your job site—and processing only takes a few minutes.
Next came some exciting news about OpenSpace Track, an OpenSpace product that uses AI to convert 360° images into objective estimates of progress. What makes these progress estimates so powerful is that they are mapped directly to floor plans and displayed in the OpenSpace dashboard in order to give teams greater visibility into how the project is built. These progress estimates are available for a number of trades, including walls and ceiling, mechanical, electrical, and concrete.
Jess Lam, OpenSpace Director of Product, gave attendees an overview of OpenSpace Track, showing how the product can enable teams to track the status and progress of all project conditions, including materials like drywall, on each level, with a high degree of accuracy. Jess also announced additional trackers are coming soon, starting with finishes. OpenSpace Track is already the fastest, most scalable automated tracking solution on the market, and it will continue to improve in 2022 with new trackers and new optimizations.
To round out the session, Nikiya Crisostomo, Community Manager, presented the brand new OpenSpace Community, an online resource built by and for construction professionals. Nikiya explained the tools and resources available through the community, like Q&A forums, issue-specific groups, and direct access to OpenSpace experts.
The team was also joined by Richard Acton-Maher, Senior Product Manager. Together, the Product Team shared quite a few additional new and improved tools that will help OpenSpace customers in 2022 and beyond, including:
In the spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing, Waypoint’s second session highlighted how OpenSpace’s power users maximize value from our products. The panel included representatives from Swinerton, Turner Construction, and Suffolk Construction, in a discussion moderated by Gabe Munes, Solutions Engineer at OpenSpace.
The panelists each shared their experiences incorporating OpenSpace into their daily work, speaking candidly about how they use OpenSpace at almost every stage of building a project. Some key points from the discussion included:
The final session, moderated by Robert Shear, VP of Marketing and Strategy at OpenSpace, focused on the future of construction and the increasingly prominent role that technology plays. In the session, executives from STO Building Group, Kitchell, Tishman Speyer, Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Aligned Data Centers discussed how the AEC industry is undergoing a generational evolution powered by a “golden age” of construction technology.
The panelists talked about how advanced analytics, industrialized construction, digitalization, and other emerging technologies render some business approaches obsolete. According to the panelists, leaders’ legacies now rest on their ability to pilot cultural transformations around technology within their organizations—a step-change toward improving worker health and safety, enhancing diversity and inclusion, and responding to external forces, such as demands for unprecedented transparency and sustainability from clients.
Panelist Carl McFarland of Kitchell summed up the conversation with an insight into the long-term view: “If the conversations you’re having during strategic planning aren’t difficult, that means you haven’t embraced the transformation that’s coming. Ask yourself, how do you rethink your business and people and objectives to align with what is inevitable: a renaissance age of transformation.”
At Waypoint 2021, we wanted to bring the best aspects of in-person events to a live virtual environment, true to our belief in the power of remote collaboration. That’s why the summit began with individual virtual networking sessions, bringing together peers for a series of rotating informational chat sessions.
Our team also gave away prizes and exclusive promotions throughout the day, including access to the beta version of OpenSpace Track and a raffle for a free Ricoh Theta Z1 camera. Of course, we wanted the Waypoint experience to be a fun respite for our hard-working community members, too, so we concluded the day with a virtual happy hour and ended the night with some karaoke.
We were thrilled to see and hear from some of the industry’s leading voices at the summit and look forward to continuing these important conversations at Waypoint 2022. In the meantime, explore our complete set of session materials and additional information.
Building on our image-first foundation, OpenSpace provides more than complete jobsite documentation; we deliver powerful construction coordination tools that put your images at the center of your daily activities in the field and in the office.
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