Gingerbread City is an annual public exhibition showcasing design ideas for future sustainability and ingenious new ways to move about our ever-increasingly populated cities. The luscious urban area made from gingerbread is curated by The Museum of Architecture and led by Melissa Woolford. More than 100 leading architects, designers, and engineers have worked tirelessly to help create this year’s exhibition at the magnificent Somerset House in Central London.
Now, in its’ fourth year of the installation, the 2019 theme is “the Future of Transport”. Visitors to the exhibition can expect to see imaginative – and edible – creations on a miniature scale.
After attending last year’s Gingerbread City exhibition, Spatial Dimensions managing director Claire Fenwick was absolutely blown away by the creativity and brilliance on display. As-built surveys complete the cycle of a construction project – it occurred to her that point cloud data could allow people to view the installation in a new and exciting way, as well as capture a permanent and accurate record.
Spatial Dimensions, a professional geomatics surveying company delivering high-quality surveys, used the Leica RTC360 to scan the city because its accurate, quick, very lightweight and extremely portable. Absolutely essential as the team was given a limited amount of time to scan the city due to the high demand and interest from the media, AEC industry and the wider general public. Combining the RTC360 with Leica Cyclone FIELD 360 application on the iPad enabled the team to scan the entire exhibition in less than an hour.
Spatial Dimensions used Leica Cyclone REGISTER 360 to process the captured data in the field and exported through Leica TruView to easily and intuitively share the captured point cloud data and design models. You can check the 3D model in TruView here.
3D reality capture solutions, like the RTC360, are the bridge to transform the real world into mirrored digital realities that can be used for all kinds of applications. 3D reality capture enables you to replicate the physical world and turn it into a virtual environment, using software to derive valuable and useful information. 3D reality capture provides a rich documentation data set so that users can always go back to site in a digital environment and check as-built documentation.
The team has been relying on reality capture since its inception in 2012 and provides measured building and scan to BIM services to a number of the UK’s leading architectural practices and engineering and building consultancies. What the RTC360 allows us to do is maximise our time out in the field, laser scanning buildings faster and reducing the processing time by using the iPad application – making it a really useful tool for busy occupied buildings, such as hotels, hospitals and leisure facilities where disruption to the occupiers needs to be kept to an absolute minimum.
The Gingerbread City 2019 exhibition & the Gingerbread House Making Workshops is open from 7 December 2019 to 5 January 2020 at Somerset House, Strand, London.
Navigate the Gingerbread City 2019 exhibition in 3D in TruView.
Learn more about Spatial Dimensions.
By Peter Fenwick
Commercial Director at Spatial Dimensions