Toronto’s George Brown College has opened a new Building Information Modeling (BIM) facility at its Casa Loma campus that incorporates the latest in cutting-edge technology.
"We are growing BIM education and research," said Clint Kissoon, chair of the Angelo DelZotto School of Construction Management at the college’s Centre for Construction and Engineering Technologies.
"Therefore, we needed to create the infrastructure with the most current equipment for BIM implementation."
The college opened its original BIM lab in October 2013. The facility trains students in virtual building design practices and promotes industry innovation through applied research projects. That lab now functions primarily as a homeroom for the college’s BIM Management post-graduate program. The space is being used "to capacity" by student and faculty researchers, Kissoon said in an email.
The new Visionarium lab, which officially opened Nov. 25, features a fully immersive curved screen supplied by George Brown partner Christie Digital. The Kitchener, Ont.-based company supplied the visualization solutions for the original lab.
"We doubled the light output and overall functionality by employing six Mirage projectors this time around," Dave Paolini, manager of media and public relations, said at the Visionarium inauguration.
"The brains behind the system, our Christie Spyder processing unit, is bigger and badder, able to handle more data and render it quickly and smoothly into 3-D images."
Paolini said a virtual reality interactivity kit enables new functionality for the 3-D glasses that come with the system "allowing one to virtually manipulate objects.
"It’s not the Star Trek holodeck yet, but we’re getting there," he quipped. "So, all in all, it (the new system) is bigger, better and all enveloping."
The space, on the third floor of Building D, was transformed into the Visionarium by a team that included RDH Architects and Moir Construction.
Funding for the new facility was provided in part by two government agencies, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Speaking at the opening, George Brown College president Anne Sado said applied research projects conducted in the BIM lab allows students to gain hands-on experience in virtual building design practices "while local companies get the support they need to adopt BIM approaches.
"The launch of this new Visionarium brings this research to the next level," she said. "This facility will offer leading-edge infrastructure that will facilitate innovation between George Brown researchers and its construction industry partners."
To date, the college has collaborated on BIM projects with various Toronto-area contractors, including Bird Construction, Tucker HiRise Construction Inc. and Gillam Group.
"We are definitely building capacity to collaborate with (more) contractors and developers in the new Visionarium," Kissoon said following the opening.
The lab is thought to be the only such facility of its kind at a post-secondary institution in Canada.
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