Used to be the best way to plan a three-dimensional construction project was on a two-dimensional blueprint, or perhaps a wooden model. We live in an era where entire digital twins -- models made of light -- can be used, but not everyone is. Bentley Systems' Greg Demchak drops by to explain why that needs to change.

Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Greg Demchak from Bentley Systems. Greg has been designing and driving the development of immersive digital simulation for architecture, engineering, and construction markets for the last 20 years. Educated as an architect, he transitioned to software design after completing a degree in design computation at MIT. He went on to become a senior user experience designer for the Autodesk Revit product, product manager for SYNCHRO 4D software platform -- now owned by Bentley Systems -- and currently leads the mixed reality team for Bentley Systems. He's been pushing the envelope of this technology and software for the Microsoft Hololens, and recently built an app for the global launch event of the next generation Hololens 2. To learn more about the work that Greg and his team at Bentley are doing, visit bentley.com. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg: Thanks, Alan. How's it

going?

Alan: It's going fantastic. I

wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to join us here.

And let's kind of unpack the work that you do at Bentley Systems.

From a 10,000 foot view, what do you guys do?

Greg: Yeah. So Bentley Systems

-- just to frame that -- is a global software company focused on

engineering and infrastructure, architecture, and construction

software. So it's-- we basically produce software for the built

environment. So anything from bridge design, to high-rise

construction, to infrastructure that needs to be modeled. And it's a

platform that serves that industry across the board.

Alan: Well, that's a big

industry, considering there's the equivalent of Manhattan, the size

of Manhattan being built every single month somewhere in the world.

So you work with large infrastructure projects, building skyscrapers,

bridges, infrastructure. How does XR fit into that?

Greg: It's a good question. So

the way we see XR fitting into this is-- and you'll see this term,

it's really becoming -- I think -- quite popular now in the industry,

is this idea of the digital twin. And what started out as 2D drafting

and then sort of evolved into 3D models, and then this idea of

building information modeling is evolving into this idea of the

digital twin, which is that any given building or asset or a piece of

infrastructure can have a parallel digital representation of itself

as a 3D model, and then also now as a 4D model, which is to say that

the model evolves and changes through time, just like the physical

building. And the XR piece is a really cool way to basically bridge

that digital and physical space in a kind of a natural way. So that's

where we are developing on top of the Hololens platform. It's

basically a way to take those digital assets, and then render those

assets as digital artifacts or 3D models or information in the

context of the physical space. So that's had the opportunity. These

buildings, these infrastructure assets are evolving and changing over

time. And you can basically render digital parts of that through the

Hololens and see a mixed reality view of the world.

Alan: So, for example, you've

got a-- let's just use a building, a skyscraper, you're building a

building, you've got the Revit models or the BIM models or the CAD

models. So let's just first of all -- for people that maybe don't

understand what those mean -- what are those three terms mean and how

are they being converted into XR technologies?