The historic 16^th Street Station in Oakland was designed by Jarvis Hunt, a Chicago architect who also designed several other railroad stations. Construction began in 1910. The Station made Oakland a major transportation hub in its early years and featured the first elevated tracks west of the Mississippi. Today, the 16^th Street Station is owned by BRIDGE Housing Corporation. RAILS, a community nonprofit, was formed to serve as the stewards of the Station's development. A community group, The Station Crew, helps plan events and care for the Station, which is situated in the middle of the newly developing Central Station neighborhood. ^{source: 16thstreetstation.com}

On Friday, after obtaining permission from all parties involved, the Reality Solutions (reality capture, augmented reality, virtual reality) team visited the 16^th Street Station. These are the employees who develop Autodesk ReCap and Autodesk ReCap 360. ReCap and ReCap 360 help you use photogrammetry and scanners, so you can start your design, your renovation, or your retrofit work with accurate 3D scanning data and full photo-quality context. You may recall Project Photofly from its early days on Autodesk Labs. The team was on-site to capture the Station using scanners and photogrammetry. The data gathered will help them perfect reality capture technology. This is important because the future of making things involves accommodating disruptions in the:

• means of Production
• nature of customer Demand
• definition of Products themselves

and one of the significant ways that the means of production will be affected is that architects and engineers will start more and more projects with captured data instead of modeling from scratch. The result will be as-built accuracy and the ability to view designs in the surrounding context.

So the Reality Solutions Team headed to the site with:

• Laser scanners: Faro X330, Leica P40, Z+F 5010C
• Panoramic capture device: NCTech iStar
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV): DJI Inspire 1, 3D Robotics Solo

I popped on over for an hour as an observer and took a few pictures just using my iPhone.

Outside

Inside

The site was simply breathtaking.

UAV

My colleague from the Office of the CTO, Gonzalo Martinez, was there with his UAV.

He let me wear the goggles so I could see what it would be like to be able to fly.

I am anxious to see how the resulting 3D model turns out based on the data captured by these high-quality devices. What the team learns from this experience will help improve ReCap and ReCap 360 that are becoming increasingly more important in the future of making things.

Reality capture is alive in the lab.