BIM Asia 2025: Scan-to-BIM live demo

BIM Asia is the most technically demanding audience we present to in any given year. The room is full of practising BIM managers, design coordinators, and structural engineers who have lived through the parts of BIM that brochures do not mention.

So when the organisers offered us a 45-minute slot on the main stage, we agreed to do something we had never done in front of a live audience — capture a half-floor of the venue with Observance, register the scan against the building's actual Revit model, and walk the deviation map on screen, in real time, with the room watching.

What happened on stage

Karthik Raghavan and Sara Lin co-presented. The capture took eleven minutes and produced a 1.4-billion-point cloud of half of the conference centre's upper level — corridor, two meeting rooms, a service shaft. The registration against the venue's coordinated BIM model took another four minutes on a laptop. The remaining thirty minutes were spent walking the deviation map on screen.

The map was honest. Several services routes had drifted from the model by 20–60 mm, almost certainly because the venue had been retrofitted twice since the original BIM was authored. Two structural members were exactly where the model said they were, to within 4 mm. One door had been moved by 180 mm during fit-out and never updated in the model.

Nothing about that result was rehearsed. The audience could see the scan register, see the colour-coded deviation overlay light up, and ask questions while the engineers walked the model. Several stayed to talk afterwards about doing the same workflow on their own facilities.

What the audience pushed back on

The most useful question of the day came from a structural engineer in the front row — "how do you decide what counts as a real deviation versus scanner noise?" The honest answer is that we publish tolerance bands per element class, derived from IS-456 and the equivalent international codes, and let the user adjudicate the edge cases. Observance flags every deviation; the engineer of record decides which ones matter.

The second question — "what about elements that move with temperature or load?" — is one we are still actively working on with two of our structural-consultant partners. We said so on stage. Pretending to have solved a problem you have not solved is the fastest way to lose this audience permanently.

Who attended

The Inkers engineering team had ten people on the ground across three days. We met BIM leads from major design practices across Singapore, the Gulf, and India, and ran a follow-up technical workshop for thirty attendees the day after the keynote.

If you missed the live demo and would like to see the same workflow on a file from one of your projects, the deployment team can run a remote session. The contact form on this site is the right starting point.