Zepth 360

A building is a sequence of concealments

Everything a building is made of gets covered by something else. Reinforcement goes under concrete, services go behind blockwork, the whole ceiling void disappears in an afternoon. The window in which any of it can be seen is short, it never reopens, and the value of having seen it only becomes apparent much later — usually in a dispute, usually about something nobody was worried about at the time.

Site photography answers this by asking people to photograph what matters before it is covered. That works, and /modules/photos/ makes the case for it — it is the single highest-value capture a project does. But it carries an assumption that deserves to be said out loud: it requires that somebody, standing there on the day, correctly anticipated which of the things in front of them would be argued about in two years.

A 360° capture removes the anticipation. It does not record what the photographer was interested in; it records what was there. The corner of the riser nobody looked at, the bracket detail nobody thought about, the dimension somebody would later dispute — all of it is in the image, because the image is the room.

Location is the natural index — and nothing is filed that way

Site information is created by location. Something happens in a room: a defect, a query, an inspection, a change. And then it is filed by document type — the snag goes in the snag register, the query goes in the RFI log, the photo goes in a folder named by date, the inspection goes in the inspection module. Each one is filed correctly and the room is dismantled across five systems.

So when somebody asks what happened at grid B-14, the answer is a search, across several places, by someone who already knows what they are looking for. Which means the question that actually gets asked is a narrower one — and the thing nobody thought to look for is the thing that costs money.

Pinning capture to the floor plan inverts the filing. The plan is the index, the location is the key, and everything that ever happened at a point is reached from the point. This is not a nicer interface. It is the difference between a record you can interrogate and a record you can only confirm.

Then and now, at the same point

Two captures of one location, from two report periods, side by side. It is the simplest view in the product and the one that gets used most, because it answers a question that is otherwise surprisingly hard to answer honestly: what actually changed here this month?

Progress reported as a percentage is an assertion — the softest number on a project, and the one payment applications are built on. A room photographed on the 25th of two consecutive months is not an assertion. Where the two disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and it is worth having before the valuation goes out rather than after.

This is the visual companion to the S-curve on /modules/schedule-control/: the programme says the floor is 80% complete, and the capture shows the floor. Neither replaces the other. But one of them can be argued with, and the other is a photograph of a room.

Capture against the model, side by side

The model says a wall here, a duct at this height, a shaft this size. The capture shows what was built. Viewing them next to each other for the same location makes as-built deviation visible while it is still a conversation — which is a narrow window, because a deviation discovered after the ceiling closes is not a conversation, it is a demolition.

To be precise about what this is: the capture and the model view sit side by side, synchronised by location. Zepth views models and CAD in the browser and works alongside your design tools — it does not author them and does not coordinate them, and this feature does not change that. It puts two pictures of the same place next to each other, which is enough to see that they differ.

Where a deviation turns out to be systemic rather than local, it escalates the normal way — the observation-to-NCR path that /modules/site-observations/ sets out. This page does not invent a second one.

The capture-to-action gap

Here is a question worth putting to any vendor selling visual site documentation, including us: when you spot a defect in the imagery, what happens next?

If the answer involves exporting the image and raising the issue somewhere else, then the evidence and the action live in different systems, and the seam between them is where things get lost. Ownership is unclear across the handoff. The snag arrives in the other system as a fresh record with an attachment, its trail beginning at the moment somebody re-typed it rather than the moment it was seen. And the link back to the place — the thing that made the observation findable in the first place — is the first casualty.

In Zepth 360 the snag or the RFI is born from the image. Location, visual evidence and timestamp are already on it because they were already on the capture, and it enters the same snag and RFI workflows the rest of the project runs on — assignment, ageing, closure evidence. It is not an export. It is the same record, seen from the place it happened.

Oversight without the flight

An owner with a portfolio cannot walk every floor of every asset every month, and the ones who try are buying a very expensive sample. What they get instead is a report: somebody else’s account of the site, illustrated with somebody else’s selection of photographs.

A visual record indexed by location and date changes what the monthly review is. The review happens inside the building as it stood on the 25th — navigable, complete from each capture point, and not curated by the party being reviewed. That is a different kind of oversight, and it is available from anywhere.

It is also, quietly, a record nobody can revise later. The account of what a floor looked like in March is not a recollection or a narrative. It is March.

The deck that used to take an evening

Every site team on every project assembles a monthly visual progress report by hand, at night, before the report is due. Screenshots into slides, captions typed, last month’s deck cannibalised for the layout.

Zepth 360 generates it from the captures: per-zone then-and-now, milestone visuals, annotated highlights, in the presentation format that owners’ boards, lenders and consultants still actually live in. It is not a more sophisticated output than the hand-made one. It is the same output, produced from the record instead of from an evening.

How Zepth runs visual reporting

Floor plans come from the document register — the same register that holds the drawings and the models — so the capture canvas is the project’s own plan, not a copy of it. Captures pin to points on that plan: 360° images, and photos and video alongside them, all carrying their location and their date.

From there it is one record, made visual. Comparisons read across dates at a point, or across the model for that point. Snags and RFIs raised from imagery are real workflow objects, routed and aged and closed like every other one. The progress presentation is generated from the captures. And the archive stands as the project’s visual record through the defects liability period and past it — which is the horizon that matters, because the argument arrives long after the site has gone quiet.