OpenSpace will be presenting a session based on this blog at Autodesk University (AU 2023) in Las Vegas on November 13 – 15. Learn more about the conference here.

Hello there, and Happy Star Wars Day! How cool to live in a world where there’s a day set aside each year to celebrate this beloved franchise. In addition to capturing our collective imagination and bringing people together across space and time, these stories actually drove unprecedented technological innovation, catapulting Hollywood into a new digital era—not unlike the digital transformation of the construction industry happening now.

George Lucas had a problem; he had next-gen ideas but lived in a legacy world. He desperately needed his industry to catch up with his vision. Before Star Wars, special effects in films hadn’t advanced in more than 20 years. To break free of the status quo, Lucas took matters into his own hands and founded Industrial Light & Magic to create the tech directly.

“To tell the stories he imagined, Lucas needed new tools and pioneered the development of digital film editing, digital cinematography, digital projection and computer generated imagery (CGI). In turn, his creative vision—and the revolutionary techniques invented to realize that vision—transformed the movies. Today, these techniques are the standard in film and television.” —The Lucas Museum

Likewise, the construction industry is receiving its own overdue upgrade, with impressive new technology that is solving persistent challenges and propelling people from sticky notes and clipboards to 360° reality capture, AI-powered analytics, and immersive 3D models that you can navigate—complete with dollhouse view reminiscent of that trench on the Death Star.

Sometimes it just takes a small band of passionate rebels with the will to get involved in a cause to escape the gravitational pull of familiar tools and current thinking and address our biggest challenges.

Keep reading this blog on openspace.ai