Project
The annual Goodwood Festival of Speed (FoS) in West Sussex, England, is the world’s largest international exhibition of motorsports. The show previews some of the most anticipated luxury and racing models from BMW, McLaren, and Mercedes, and honors the history of motor vehicles. To help attendees celebrate the 2017 FoS theme, Peaks of Performance - Motorsport's Game-Changers, Siemens partnered with Bentley and Topcon to create a digital model of the Goodwood Hillclimb—a world-famous stretch of driveway that attracts an annual crowd of around 100,000 for historic motor racing. The goal was to provide an explorable, interactive virtual reality (VR) experience for the show’s Future Lab showcase.
Solution
The scope of work for this project included producing a scalable hybrid model from reality meshes built with Bentley’s ContextCapture, and supplementing the model with mobile laser scan data. The project team surveyed the 1.16-mile track using Topcon’s Falcon8 drone for photos and an IP-S3 vehicle for laser scanning. Integrating Bentley Pointools enabled extensive editing of the data, helping the team blend multiple datasets into a single federated model. Moreover, developing a customized multi-touch viewer for the model allowed the VR users to quickly jump to different parts of the hill climb as part of the interactive experience.
Outcome
ContextCapture automatically processed images into accurate reality meshes documenting existing conditions of the Goodwood Hillclimb while automating the reconstruction of the site model. The accuracy and production speed of Bentley’s reality modeling software enabled the project team to extract the finest details from the imagery obtained in a fraction of the time that would have been required for traditional surveying. The results demonstrated how Bentley’s reality modeling advancements can meld digital and physical worlds for projects of any size or complexity.
Software
The photogrammetric reconstruction capabilities provided by ContextCapture enabled the Siemens-Bentley team to leverage information from a Topcon drone and a handheld camera, as well as several perimeter ground control points. The software not only automated reconstruction of the track site model in mere hours, but made it possible for the team to produce a 3D reality mesh of a Ducati motorbike for use in the interactive VR experience. The demonstrations allowed attendees to explore the technology hands-on using a large touch screen monitor and VR headsets.
Project Playbook: ContextCapture, Bentley Pointools