AEC Hackathon 6.1 Inspires Creative Solutions

Editor’s Note: Each award-winning team contributed to this article by providing a description of its product.

Last month, fifty plus people gathered to geek out for two days to attend the AEC Hackathon 6.1 Silicon Valley, the fortieth hackathon that has taken place since 2013. The AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) Hackathon was created to give those involved with designing, building, and maintaining our built environment the opportunity to collaborate with cutting edge technologies and their developers and designers.

This Hackathon brought together students and professionals from the fields of architecture, engineering, construction, and software programming. Seven teams were formed and each team was tasked to identify a real issue that repeatedly occurs in the day to day workflow of architecture, construction or their related fields, and then create a technology-based solution to address it. Some teams worked on finetuning their project from a previous AEC Hackathon or office project, while others started from scratch. Team presentations on the final day gave everyone the opportunity to hear about all the projects and an Award Ceremony concluded this event with collegiate vibes and professionalism. The judges of the presentation were: Anthony Jones, CEO of Mosaic Document Solutions, Christopher Peri, Sr. Director at Samsung (VR/AR), and a representative from Unity.

Product: Urban.Insights
Award: Best Overall Project
Team: Urban.Insights
Team Members: Matthias Tweddell Levinsen, Mikkel Esrup Steenberg, Mathias Sønderskov Nielsen, and Ptar Mitev

The project Urban.Insights is a communication tool which allows citizens to visualize and comment on nearby building proposals in their local neighborhood. Through a web app, the neighbors are able to see proposed projects placed in their context on their phones and tablets. A 3D viewer featuring augmented reality makes it possible to see the proposed projects from your home, so you can determine if it might cast shadows on your porch, or ruin your view to the sea, or visualize other physical conditions. The user can capture these views, add comments and upload that feedback to the project teams. By having a tool like this, there is a higher likelihood that citizens become engaged and show up at community meetings; and the tool empowers citizens with the opportunity to visualize their feedback. The community hearing process just went from monologue to dialogue.

Product: AR Drone Flight Monitor
Award: Best Hack from a Past Event
Team: No Fly Zone
Team Member: Lauren Winter

Professional drone piloting requires line of sight visual monitoring of the drone. Because drones are small and difficult to see at any distance greater than 200 feet, an AR-based assistant that uses drone telemetry, altitude and GPS location, to locate and track the drone is of great value. My project integrated the Apple AR Kit into our autonomous drone piloting app to show the flight path and location in real time, giving the pilot a tool to visually locate and track the drone at any distance and altitude.

Product: Mission Control AEC
Award: Best Mashup Project
Team: SFCDUG (San Francisco Computational Design User Group)
Team Members: Alberto Tono, Danny Bentley, Dennis Eldridge and Daniel Clayson

Soon to be a non-profit organization, the San Francisco Computational Design Users Group’s mission is to help the adoption of programming languages and new techniques such as generative design machine learning and others. We are now giving back to the community the prize that we received in order to promote and facilitate the participation to these events. We started our Hackathon Project, Mission Control AEC, in 2016 while working at HOK and just released its open source based on the mission that Carl Galioto, FAIA, President of HOK, put forth:

At HOK, we’re pushing for these changes through our support of groups like buildingSMART International and a particular focus on:

Modernizing the HOK buildingSMART virtual design and construction initiative with a host of initiatives to help it better serve the industry.

Supporting open-source software projects.

Developing an industry consortium to help fund and seed future open-source projects for the industry.

Mission Control AEC is a web management tool that allows for better quality control of all our BIM Models without the need to open each model one by one, which saves an incredible amount of time, and assures the data integrity and performance stability in the environment. Furthermore, the tool can track the progression of every event and operation that happens in the Model. Thanks to the Forge and Design Automation API, Mission Control is also capable of performing the changes in the BIM environment.

During the Hackathon, the SFCDUG Team further developed Mission Control AEC to create a predictive model based on Time-Series that would help to not only forecast failures and corruptions, but also increase the liability of the models. The Proof of Concept developed during the weekend was strictly focused on monitoring views in relationship with the sheets. The goal was to integrate BIM Level 3 and Building Knowledge Modeling with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning so that they could quickly become part of the ecosystem and help the development of the project, forecasting and preventing errors and corruptions.

Product: Quality Assurance/Quality Control Augmented Reality Tool
Award: Best Project That Solves a Big AEC Problem
Team: Spam Shake LLC
Team Members: Devin Baldwin, Melissa Frydlo, Logan Smith, and Leo Nyugen

There are many potential risks during the lifecycle of a construction project. The team quickly agreed upon the need to develop an easy, user-friendly document control tool for the field. With Logan Smith’s expertise in augmented reality and Rivet and his background in architecture and spatial relations, Logan modified a 3D model for our presentation and created a prototype in less than sixteen hours.

The resulting model serves as a 3D as-built drawing and references back to the original contract drawings. This product also serves as a fully-functional-real-time-multi user-friendly quality assurance / quality control augmented reality tool by bringing the field office even further into the field. It allows timely decisions and approvals required by the engineers and architects. Furthermore, this solution allows the owner to observe progress in a way that has never been so easily presented to them.

Product: Powered Paddleboards
Award: Best Challenging Our People Pipeline
Team: Where’s My Drill?!?!?!
Team Members: Brett Young and Sons

The inception of our project was a practical need – I was looking for a solution to power my kids’ paddleboards so they could keep pace with me when I train. In my research, I found that commercial off-the-shelf tech from power tools used incredible battery technology. Putting together a “hacked” drill solution then became a fun way to engage my kids in construction technology and the joys of building. The secondary benefit for me was the experience of our plan, despite being simple, encountering multiple failures and the resulting insights into engineering innovation. Testing is critical, simple is better than complex, and execution can’t be rushed. The team name came about because one of my sons dropped a hammer drill into San Francisco Bay; which was not a user error but a system design problem.

The AEC Hackathon consists of an amazing community of building environment and tech innovators. If you have the opportunity, join in on the fun but at the same time help find solutions for the many issues that we encounter over and over again in the field of architecture, engineering, and construction. The next upcoming AEC Hackathons in 2019 are listed below:

• March 29 – 31: San Antonio, Texas, United States
• April 26th – 28th: Seattle, Washington, United States
• Summer – London, United Kingdom
• TBD – Seattle, Washington, United States
• TBD – Shanghai, China
• TBD – Helsinki, Finland
• TBD – Austin, Texas, United States