North-east 3D scanning firm reports busiest year to date

12/05/2022
Co-founder and director, Chris Harvey, Business Manager Lynn Park and Co-founder and Director, Richard Drennan.

ABERDEEN-based 3D scanning specialists, Viewport3, have hailed 2021 as their most successful year since launching in 2017. With revenue from new customers alone exceeding £100,000, the company has moved into larger premises, and is currently recruiting additional team members to cope with ever-growing customer demand, and a successful drive to offer services in the offshore renewables market.

Despite the travel restrictions imposed over the past two years, the firm experienced huge growth in demand for their services, particularly in relation to their ability to work remotely, guiding the data collection from the beach, and then reviewing and reconstructing in 3D based on the data uploaded from the vessel.

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They recently moved into new headquarters in Foveran, Aberdeenshire, affording them much larger, self-contained premises, whilst also allowing an increase in the number of custom high-powered PCs.

Having already expanded their offshore team, Viewport3 are now recruiting for additional team members to meet client demand for their highly specialised services.

The past year has seen the team expand their capabilities by carrying out 2 onshore projects, and 3 emergency remote projects, in addition to their offshore and legacy video work. These include inspecting a flooded quarry, civil pipelines, mooring lines, fairleads, wellheads, gaskets and a subsea template. Legacy projects involve processing existing video footage to enhance quality and so support inspection and maintenance regimes.

They also developed a new online viewer platform for reviewing 3D data files. ‘Viewport View’ brings the firm’s customers closer to their 3D data, regardless of the format or who collected it. Designed to offer simple, user-friendly access to 3D data files, without the requirement for any specialist hardware, training or installation, it bridges the understanding gap for non-technical personnel in a way that a stack of 2D drawings simply cannot. As such it adds value to HSE planning, site awareness, HIRAs, and risk assessment meetings where the data can be viewed real-time in a 3D format.

The Viewport3 team have also started work on their latest R&D project – the Viewport3 camera, which they have developed in response to a clear market need for new, good quality cameras with the capability to retrieve accurate data-sets from assets. Once testing is complete, these cameras will form part of the photogrammetry kits which Viewport3 plan to lease for storage on-board vessels. Working on projects remotely revealed a gap in the market for such a kit of ready-to-deploy equipment that will enable the on-site team to carry out 3D scans under the remote guidance of the Viewport3 team.

Co-founder and Director, Chris Harvey said: “Since our launch in 2017 we have steadily and diligently established a very strong reputation in both the offshore and topside sectors. However we have long known that our 3D photogrammetry processes offer huge added value to clients across a host of different sectors, so it was particularly gratifying for us to expand our client base to include the renewables and inshore civil industries over the past year.”

Fellow founder and Director, Richard Drennan added: “It’s no exaggeration to say that the Viewport3 team really have risen to the challenge of the past two years, and then some. The precision of the technical grade data we supply (down to 0.06mm in some cases), the speed of our response to clients, particularly in emergency situations, the cost-savings for field operators in vessel and maintenance costs – these are all part and parcel of the Viewport3 service. Our team work extremely hard to maintain these standards, and it’s no accident that we frequently work with returning customers. We look forward to building on this success, expanding our global footprint, as well as our presence across new sectors, and launching our new products to market in the coming year.”

Viewport3 specialise in providing 3D scanning and reverse engineering services – using digital cameras to obtain technical grade point-cloud data, which the firm then processes into 3D to produce straightforward reports and outputs. Since 2017, Viewport3 conservatively estimate £16m in savings for field operators by deploying their high-end 3D scanning techniques.

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