From Scan to Semantics: Making Digital Twins Useful

Digital twins only deliver outsized value when 3D starts at design. In this episode, Max Limper talks with Antonio González Viegas (CEO, That Open Company) about why many buildings still lack native BIM and how the industry fills the gap with scan-to-BIM. Antonio explains that the core blocker isn’t raw rendering tech, it’s semantics and a closed, proprietary ecosystem. Point clouds or “triangle soup” aren’t useful until you can select an object (e.g., a column) and attach properties. They dig into IFC/STEP bottlenecks for the real-time web (heavy parsing and thousands of Boolean operations before first frame) and how Fragments, an open-source format by That Open Company, pre-bakes geometry + metadata to load huge models in seconds after conversion. Looking ahead, the team is pushing two fronts beyond viewing: native open editing and automated 2D documentation (PDF plans) from 3D, still the industry’s dominant deliverable.