OpenSpace for Construction Documentation and Progress Tracking

In-Depth Review

OpenSpace addresses a documentation problem that general contractors have managed badly for decades: getting consistent, mapped visual records of site conditions without making workers stop and manually photograph everything. The platform’s answer is a 360-degree camera clipped to a hard hat that captures images continuously as a superintendent or project engineer walks the floor. Computer vision processes those images after the walk and pins each photo to the correct location on the uploaded floor plan. No manual tagging. No stopping to compose a shot. The documentation happens as part of a site walk that was already going to happen.

What OpenSpace Does on a Real Project

The core value is the auto-mapping capture workflow. Upload your floor plans, clip the camera to a hard hat, walk the site. When the walk is complete, the platform processes the footage and produces a clickable floor plan where every documented location opens the corresponding 360-degree photo. On a large commercial project with 20 or more floors, this replaces hundreds of hours of manual photo organization that would otherwise fall to project engineers.

Time-lapse comparisons are the second major use case. Because every site walk captures photos at the same mapped locations, the platform builds a chronological record at each point. You can open any location on the floor plan and step through photos from every visit. This is practical for several situations: confirming that a specific trade completed work before the ceiling closed, establishing when a condition was created, or generating a visual response to a subcontractor claiming work was done at a different time. The record is difficult to dispute because it is keyed to the floor plan and timestamped automatically.

BIM Sync aligns 360 photos against the equivalent view in the project BIM model. A project engineer can open a model view showing the mechanical room layout and compare it side-by-side with the 360 photo of the same area. Deviations appear visually without requiring someone to hold the model in their head and evaluate the field condition from memory. On MEP-intensive projects where installation sequences matter and coordination models are detailed, this is a practical quality control step before ceiling or wall closures.

Track, the AI progress detection module, analyzes photo captures to estimate percent complete by area. The system identifies installed materials and finishes from imagery and produces a heatmap showing progress across the floor plan. For owners or construction managers who need progress reporting across multiple projects, this is faster than collecting self-reported PM updates. The accuracy ceiling depends on how consistently the site is walked and photographed; areas that are missed in a given week produce gaps in the progress estimate.

Pricing Reality

OpenSpace does not publish pricing. Contracts are structured around factors including project count, total square footage, and contract duration. The hardware adds a separate cost dimension: the 360-degree cameras must be purchased or rented, managed across the site crew, and replaced when damaged. Get detailed quotes that include hardware costs before comparing against the total cost of alternative documentation approaches. Some GCs find the hardware management overhead meaningful on projects with high site turnover.

One Thing to Test Before Committing

During the demo, ask to see the floor plan auto-mapping accuracy on a floor plan format similar to what your projects actually use: your specific drawing template, with your sheet title block, at the scales your architects typically use. Auto-mapping accuracy is strong on standard formats and sometimes degrades on unusual floor plan layouts, large open spaces with few distinguishing features, or atypical sheet setups. Test on a floor type that represents your typical project before assuming the demo accuracy applies to your work.

Who This Is For

General contractors and construction managers on commercial, healthcare, infrastructure, or industrial projects above $10M get the most from OpenSpace. The passive capture model pays off when sites are large enough that manual photo documentation is genuinely impractical, when owner reporting requirements create regular documentation obligations, or when dispute risk is elevated and a factual visual record has real value. Small residential contractors and remodelers running straightforward projects will find the hardware requirements and pricing difficult to justify against the documentation benefit they need.