Bentley Systems boosting business with acquisition

Construction software specialist 4019 Bentley Systems continues to develop its portfolio of solutions with yet another acquisition. The company is growing both organically and through acquisition, this time buying up the French firm Acute3D, provider of Smart3DCapture software for reality modelling. Through reality modelling, observations of existing conditions can be processed into representations for contextual alignment within design modelling and construction modelling environments. According to Bentley, rapid technology advances in scanning and photography, and especially the growing application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for these purposes, are making the capture of these observations affordable in sustaining infrastructure.

Acute3D software automates the generation of high-resolution, fully-3D representations from digital photographs taken with any camera, whether highly specialised or embedded in a smartphone. Scalable from site to city, and with precision limited only by the quantity and quality of photography, Acute3D technology can assure that existing conditions are contemporaneously considered throughout the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations of any infrastructure asset. Now that photo sequences from UAVs are becoming a feasible source for surveying, construction monitoring, and inspection workflows, Acute3D’s industrial-level accuracy and unlimited scalability are making it a preferred technology for UAV manufacturers and professionals around the world.

Bentley Systems Founder and CTO Keith Bentley said, “The world-class Acute3D developers have already achieved two breakthroughs, which remove the barriers to the adoption of reality modelling. First, Acute3D has made it possible for anyone to sufficiently capture existing conditions with just a camera. Of equal importance is the value of the Acute3D result. Rather than a voluminous cloud of discrete points, Acute3D produces a 3D ‘reality mesh’ – intrinsically in the same geometric idiom as engineering models, readily aligning the real-world context.
Acute3D was co-founded in 2011 by Dr Jean-Philippe Pons and Dr Renaud Keriven, who have attracted and led an accomplished team of researchers and developers, headquartered in Sophia Antipolis. Since its founding, Acute3D has attracted a rapidly expanding user base that includes 5313 Nokia, PASCO, and 757 Saint-Gobain, and OEM licensees that include Airbus Group and 685 Autodesk. In China, Internet giant Tencent is working with Acute3D to do large-scale 3D city modeling for several mega-cities, from both aerial and street view photography. Other applications of Acute3D have included existing conditions capture for construction sites.