Dive Brief:

• If 2013 was the year that building information modeling (BIM) got a solid grip on large commercial construction, 2014 may be the year that laser-scanning of structures and use of of LiDAR – light direction and ranging – to gather building data.
• Part of the demand for both BIM and the scanning data is building owners' wanting to get 3-D models of their buildings to use for maintenance and "asset visualization," Microdesk President Michael DeLacey said.
• While BIM can be expensive to acquire, DeLacey said he thinks the demand to do more with less, requiring efficiency, will drive the demand at the same time that some governments are requiring BIM submissions.

Dive Insight:

"In the building space, vertical construction, BIM has become a de facto standard. Most of the firms we’ve talked to have told us that most new projects started today will be using BIM," DeLacey said in an interview with GeoDataPoint. Improvements in gathering and using three-dimensional data will make BIM more useful to highway and other civil engineering projects, he added.