When I started my career almost three decades ago, I worked in the project control department of a major engineering firm. One of my company's projects was the revamp of a huge petrochemical plant in Texas. The building I worked in had an entire floor full of 3D scale models of every unit of the industrial plant. In order to retrofit the new facilities into the old, the engineers had to know precisely what existed already, and that's what the models represented. A typical model might be of a flare unit, the "smokestack" on top of a building where excess gases are safely burned.

If this project were to be done today, it's likely that those space-hogging physical models would be replaced by a few ordinary PCs hosting virtual 3D models of the refinery that are embedded with intelligence. An engineer could click on any single point of the virtual model and get very sophisticated information about that exact point on the real object, in this case, the unit of the petrochemical plant. He could see the exact XYZ coordinates of that point relative to the entire object; view a digital photograph consisting of pixels containing color and grid location; and view GPS data consisting of longitude, latitude and altitude. All together, this data creates an incredibly realistic view of a real physical object or place.

By putting this model into a CAD system, the engineer could look at his virtual object from any possible angle. He could zoom in, zoom out, rotate and tilt the object. And he could deconstruct it and design the revamp changes, all without leaving his desk.

This technology is already a boon to the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, but it could be applied to hundreds of other trades as well, such as interior design, automotive design, crime scene forensics, accident reconstruction, and plastic or reconstructive surgery. The list of potential applications is endless. I suspect that in a few short years, this will be commonplace technology in many of our industries.

InteliSum is the company behind this really cool and innovative imaging technology, called InteliPixel technology. The 3D scanning technology includes a 28 megapixel camera and patented software that embeds each pixel of a 3D scan with intelligence. I won’t even pretend that I fully understand how this magic happens, but I do comprehend that this is paradigm-busting technology for the world of 3D imaging. InteliSum modestly calls it “the next technology iteration for digital cameras.” I’ll do my best to describe it here.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.