I just toured the newly built headquarters of a financial corporation. Our guide, a M&A specialist, boasted that they have completely removed paper from their offices. Could paperless construction become feasible any time soon? PaperLight is a portable smart board that could replace paper drawings on many occasions.
Rollout, Inc., the developer of PaperLight, says that 90% of contractors still use paper plans. AEC firms spend, on average, $1600 per employee on printing annually. Over 37 million construction drawings are printed every year. Finding a usable solution that reduces these numbers makes economic sense. Even more so if you consider all the costs of errors that result from using outdated paper drawings.
Some contractors already use tablets, but they are typically personal devices. PaperLight is a portable smart board that has a touch-enabled projection display. It projects the image on a 32 by 24-inch surface. The device connects to your laptop so that you can -among other things- draw sketches, make new designs, and view, markup, and share AEC drawings and models. The image is large enough for team viewing. You can also project the image on a wall.
PaperLight picks up changes made with styluses or fingertips. You can zoom in and out with your fingers, just as you do with a tablet. It allows you to work with any software, e.g. Photoshop, Autodesk AutoCAD, SketchUp, and Revit. Coupled with cloud-based communications it allows real time collaboration.
The device is shatterproof, water-resistant, and portable. It weighs 20 lbs and uses It uses a regular 100-240V, 50-60 Hz power supply, so you don’t run out of power during an important meeting.
Rollout Inc. has launched a crowdfunding campaign that ends on May 7, 2016, at 6:00PM CDT. If you want to support, do it now at https://www.spurstartup.com/paperlight!
Here’s a video that demonstrates the capabilities of PaperLight:
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