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Hardly surprising, as making stuff is tough, with small margins, active competition, tight schedules and a demanding public forcing them to use any tool at hand to shave costs, speed up production and improve quality.

Not any more though, as Bentley's Year in Infrastructure conference highlighted a number of areas where the adoption of the very latest technology is changing the way the industry works. From conception to completion, and then right through to asset management, the digital revolution has made itself felt, putting some exciting new tools in the hands of construction professionals.

The ubiquitous use of mobile technology has transformed the way architects and engineers collaborate on a building project, enabling them to carry with them complete 3D digital models of the project, and to navigate through that model on site, compare the digital model with the physical, query and annotate features, snapping the relevant part, and then updating the model and associated project management software back in the office. But we already know that!

Let's go back to square one. What will the project look like when it is placed amongst its neighbours, populated with some trees, plants, people and vehicles? Is it a viable project? Again, pretty common stuff, but the pace of software development and the power of the latest computers means you can now build a virtual project in real time, while sitting down with the client, to bring in terrain models, satellite imagery, the building model, and then add vehicles moving along paths, trees that change with the seasons, and sway in the wind, and water that moves naturally - and then to explore different options at the whim of the client.

But what if you have an existing structure that you want to develop - a highly complex gothic building say, or a section of industrial plant? Last year you would have used 3D scanners to produce point cloud data to reconstruct a digital 3D model. Now you can use a standard digital camera to take multiple shots of a building, fly a camera equipped drone over it for aerial shots, and then throw the results in a single file into a piece of software that sorts out the relationships, sizes and perspectives of every shot to build a highly detailed and usable 3D model of the building, complete with signage, textures and material condition

But we can go further, and see what's behind a wall or road. The ability to point an iPad at a building and look on the screen at the MEP pipework behind the wall has been around for a couple of years now. The same facility can also be used by civil engineers at street level, to visualise the underground pipe network, and to mark out the exact spot where digging has to take place. This is dependent, of course, on the availability of an accurate and fully tagged 3D model of the underground elements.

One of the category winners at this year's Bentley Be Inspired Awards, Which took place at the Year in Infrastructure Conference (see the article on page 10), was the UK company Western Power Distribution, who won special recognition for Advancing Information Mobility in Operations. The company has issued 3,500 of its engineers with iPads - for asset management initially, with instant access to the West Country civil engineering asset database, but they most certainly have the means in place to 'see further' in the future.

Finally, in our 2015 CAD User Guide to BIM the wrong images were reproduced in the Tekla case studies. Our apologies to Tekla for the error - we have reprinted the case studies with the correct imagery in this issue of the magazine.

by David Chadwick