Philippines-based construction company EEI is using Californian firm OpenSpace’s AI-powered 360˚ site documentation and analysis platform to improve collaboration among onsite and offsite personnel.

EEI is using OpenSpace on more than a dozen projects, including the Grand Hyatt Manila Residences, Seasons Residences and the SMDC Light 2 Residencies facilitated through Digiscript, a regional seller partner based in the Philippines. Other projects using OpenSpace’s automated construction documentation technology include infrastructure and electromechanical work.

EEI is looking for ways to improve project delivery. As part of this goal, the company began exploring different ways to improve collaboration between onsite builders and offsite subject matter experts, a mission that became especially important amid travel and mobility restrictions during the pandemic.

“We thoroughly evaluated several products that were very similar to OpenSpace,” said Glenn Villaseñor, senior vice president at EEI. “In the end, we felt that their solution and its features had the best fit with our virtual design and construction (VDC) roadmap. In addition to enabling our desire to bring the jobsite to our people who are off-site, it was also compelling to let our field operations teams explore the use case for 3D models in their work. It was quite helpful that OpenSpace’s technology had built-in integrations with our existing suite of VDC tools, as well.”

OpenSpace enables remote collaboration from anywhere in the world by automatically creating a digital replica of a construction site through 360˚ photo documentation. A builder simply attaches a small camera to their hardhat, marks their starting location on the floor plan in the OpenSpace app, and then walks the site as normal. OpenSpace automates image capture and, once the imagery is uploaded, stitches it together to create a navigable Google Street View-style digital replica of the site. Collaborators can oversee and manage progress over time, compare site images to the BIM, and make field notes to flag specific issues, among other features.

“Collaboration using OpenSpace can potentially span various processes, from progress reporting, to quality control, to safety and security, to the handling of other types of project delivery issues,” said Norman Macapagai, executive vice president at EEI. “We look forward to realising more value from the use of this technology in the months ahead.”

Founded in 2017, OpenSpace is a San Francisco-based tech company that combines simple 360˚ cameras, computer vision and AI to make it easy to capture a complete visual record of the jobsite, share it via the cloud and track progress. To date, its customers have used the platform to capture more than 0.37 billion square metres of imagery from active construction projects across thousands of sites in over fifty countries.  

A member of the Yuchengco group of companies, EEI is a construction companies in the Philippines, celebrating 90 years of business in 2021. It has a broad range of construction and engineering services, with expertise in the construction of infrastructure, buildings, and industrial and electromechanical facilities.