Pointools headlines at Bentley conference

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Point clouds — the 3D data points collected by laser scanning devices — were a hot topic Bentley’s Be Together Conference in Philadelphia. During the technology keynote, Bhupinder Singh, SVP of Bentley Software, presented Bentley’s product vision for the adoption of the Pointools Vortex engine — for referencing point clouds inside Bentley applications.

Afterwards, Tony Rogers, co-founder and director of Pointools was joined by Paul DiGiacobbe of HNTB and Bentley’s product director for MicroStation, Chris Bober, to share more detail. Both presentations highlighted the value users realize by incorporating point cloud models during the design and delivery of infrastructure projects.

The Be Together Conference took place May 17 to 20 at the Pennsylvania Convention Centre in Philadelphia. With nine individual sub-conferences, including Structural, Utilities and Communications, Roads and Bridges, Plant, and MicroStation and ProjectWise, the conference offered key areas of interest for every practitioner.

The inclusion of Pointools on the conference agenda followed the signing last year of a continuous technology transfer agreement to incorporate the Vortex engine in Bentley’s platform, enabling Bentley Software users to interoperably reference, and manage, virtually unlimited point cloud data for intelligent infrastructure modeling.

Tony Rogers of Pointools commented: “It is a great honour for Pointools to partner with Bentley at this prestigious event. We share many of the same users, so it was natural for us to join the conference programme,” he said. “For the conference attendees that don’t already use our software products, we were able to demonstrate our capabilities for point cloud editing and clean up, and for producing animation, in the interactive ‘LIVE’ Zone for Modelling & Analysis — a dynamic forum where visitors could get hands-on interaction with Pointools solutions.”

The Pointools Vortex API (Application Programming Interface), selected for integration within Bentley MicroStation, is the engine that powers all Pointools products. It is ideally suited to the demanding requirements of MicroStation users in the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) sectors due to its unrivalled ability to handle even the largest point cloud datasets. The fully embedded Pointools Vortex engine will allow users to load, display, and analyse billions of points from virtually any scanning device.