Mezmeriz
A Fast and Easy Way to Map 3D Spaces

Riding atop new technological innovations, 3D reality capture or mapping has become essential to industries such as virtual reality (VR), autonomous vehicles, and construction. While the former two garner much of the attention, construction is an industry where vast improvements in productivity and waste reduction are expected from increased use of 3D reality capture data.

The idea of using 3D reality capture solutions to aid the building process is not entirely novel, as terrestrial laser scanning technologies for this purpose have been around for the last 40 years. However, the high cost, the complexity of data processing, and the fact that the measured output of these technologies still requires several manual and time-consuming post-processing of data before making actionable decisions have limited their use in all but the most critical of projects. In fact, 90 percent of all construction projects go over budget and take longer than planned. Cost overruns resulting from fixing errors during construction can increase the cost of a building by a staggering 30 percent.

This is where Mezmeriz brings its expertise to provide a unique reality capture solution aimed specifically at lowering the cost barrier and providing useful data outputs to construction project managers. For this inexpensive 3D reality capture solution, Mezmeriz has combined its proprietary nanophotonic laser scanning technology and data processing algorithms to address the needs of the construction market.

The company’s first-generation Lightsphere camera can map and automatically digitize spaces at a push of a button. Boasting a measurement accuracy of 1cm or better, and a price point well below $10,000, the device is capable of scanning and digitizing entire buildings in a few hours. According to company founder Shahyaan Desai, “Our Gen-1 ultraportable 3D mapping system allows users to accurately scan and create BIM models for physical spaces with the push of a button.”

More remarkable to the performance and low cost of Mezmeriz’s hardware is its proprietary data processing engine interacted with the hardware that can automatically creat accurate as-built building documentation, and 3D Building Information Models (BIM) and compare their accuracy against the original designs. This capability permits near real-time tracking of building progress, which means errors can be caught and corrected before they propagate too far into the construction process where they become more costly to rectify.

With the goal of providing an end-to-end artificial intelligence-enabled hardware/software suite, the company is currently collaborating with a major mobile phone company to segment spaces and recognize rooms and objects within it for an indoor mapping and localization project. Mezmeriz also has ongoing collaborations with regional construction companies to develop dimensionally accurate and photorealistic digital twins of construction sites similar to Google’s Streetview, for remote visual inspections and site management.

At the core of such successful partnerships lies Mezmeriz’s multi-disciplinary team that constantly pushes the company to tackle challenging problems. This innovative culture has already helped the company earn its stripes in the 3D mapping landscape. For the next few months, Mezmeriz plans to concentrate on expanding its team while ramping up the production of Lightsphere Camera with new functionalities. In a bid to drive the evolution of 3D mapping further, Mezmeriz is currently working on its second generation of 3D sensors. Once embedded in the Lightsphere Camera, these Gen-2 sensors, according to Desai, “can accelerate the evolution 3D mapping technology faster than we have imagined.”