Last week, our team gathered for a lunchtime status report and demo of SUPERSTRUCTURES’ drone-based “reality capture,” conducted by the firm’s partners and Tech studio.

Since our founding 40 years ago, we’ve dreamed of photographically capturing a building’s facade, creating a “digital twin,” and bringing it back to the office for inspection, analysis, and formulation of a restoration strategy.

That dream is becoming a reality thanks to the advent of drones equipped with high-resolution cameras and navigation controls that can fly a consistent distance from the building’s face and capture the overlapping images required for an inspectable model. Photogrammetry software and large-screen, high-resolution monitors complete the picture.

And perhaps most critically, permitted drone flights recently became legal in NYC. SUPERSTRUCTURES has used drones extensively outside the city, but now we expect our drone use to “take off,” so to speak.

Drone imagery makes our analysis sharper and our restoration documents better. We can see conditions that are otherwise inaccessible or invisible and be more confident in our solutions and scope. Projects experience fewer change orders that impact cost or schedule.

The clarity of our most recent models has left clients viewing them literally speechless.

More posts to follow, including video tours and demos.