Seeing Clearly: Why Every Smart Building Starts with Reality by Stephen DeVito, Director of Technology, Procon Consulting.
Across the built environment, we’ve made major strides in digital systems – BIM, CMMS, PMIS, IWMS, GIS – yet we’re still struggling with the same fundamental problem: none of these systems share a single, verified understanding of what actually exists.
Every facility creates a flood of information, but it’s often disconnected, abstracted, or outdated. The result? A fragmented digital ecosystem where decisions are made on incomplete or inaccurate data. That’s why we continue to see roughly 30% of lifecycle costs lost to inefficiency, rework, and bad information management.
The solution starts with reality, literally.
At Procon Consulting, we believe that visual intelligence should form the base layer of all digital building information. Think of it like Google Maps: it works because every dataset: traffic, weather, business listings – is reconciled against a live, constantly updated image of the real world. The accuracy and usefulness of every layer above it depend on that underlying visual truth.
The same logic applies to buildings and infrastructure. For too long, reality capture required expensive scanning and specialized expertise, making it impractical for routine use. But that’s changing. The rapid advancement of 360° photo and video documentation technologies, through platforms like OpenSpace, Reconstruct, and others, has made reality capture accessible, fast, and affordable.
Now, anyone with a 360° camera can walk a site and generate an immersive, time-stamped visual record of existing conditions, continuously and repeatedly throughout a facility’s lifecycle. That record can be automatically mapped to design drawings, BIM models, or floor plans. Combined with SLAM-based scanning tools like NavVis VLX and MLX, we can now capture both the geometric accuracy and the visual richness of a building, a living, continuously updated picture of reality that’s easy to navigate and share.
For facility owners, it means you finally have a verified visual baseline for all your buildings, a common reference point for maintenance, renovation, and planning. For design and construction teams, it means better coordination, fewer site visits, and faster issue resolution. For operations, it’s a real-world dashboard that connects your asset data, space data, and performance data in one visual context.
At Procon, we help clients take that next step, integrating these visual datasets with their CMMS, PMIS, IWMS, and BIM environments to create a “reality-synchronized digital ecosystem.” The visual layer becomes the anchor point, the truth against which all other information is reconciled.
Visual intelligence isn’t just another tool. It’s the foundation for everything else.
Because at the end of the day, every data point in the built environment still points back to something physical, something real, and if your systems can’t see it, they can’t manage it.
That’s why the future of building intelligence starts, quite literally, with seeing clearly.
