Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 10 /Jul 21, 2025
Why Cintoo's CEO says point cloud compression changes everything
Dominique Pouliquen, Cintoo
Jul 21, 2025 /Reality Capture & Existing Conditions
Why Cintoo's CEO says point cloud compression changes everything
Dominique Pouliquen is the CEO of Cintoo, a cloud platform that compresses and streams laser-scan data, after 25 years in 3D computer graphics at companies from Dassault to Autodesk. Point clouds, the raw output of laser scanners, were too heavy to share until his team made them small enough for a browser. He explains what reality capture is for and why cost still keeps most buildings from having a digital twin.
Dominique Pouliquen, CEO, Cintoo
In this conversation
Dominique's plain definition of why anyone laser scans a building, and what the hardware cost ten years ago versus today.
The difference between a BIM model, a dollhouse view and a digital twin, and why the connection to live data is the whole point.
What sophisticated owners use in the absence of a twin: spreadsheets, CAD, photos, and why cost keeps them there.
His advice to founders: know your lane, because product strategy and running a sales team are different jobs.
You laser scan an existing building because you want to make a 3D model out of it, a BIM model out of it.
Dominique Pouliquen
Chapters
Twenty-five years of 3D
From flight simulators and television graphics to reality capture.
Compression changed everything
How making point clouds small enough for the cloud changed who could use them.
By the numbers
The existing commercial building stock in the United States
commercial buildings
square feet
Dominique explains that owners without a digital twin fall back on spreadsheets, CAD and photos. This is the scale of what those tools are managing.
Source: U.S. EIA, Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey 2018 ↗Demystifying the digital twin
Cutting through the hype around digital twins.
What sophisticated owners use instead
The tools owners actually rely on today, and why.
Selling into AEC
What selling into architecture and construction taught a technologist.
The digital twin is connected to the outside world, with sensor data, with all kinds of documentation.
Dominique Pouliquen
Takeaways
A single tripod scan captures tens of millions of points and about two gigabytes; compression is what made that data shareable, and sharing is what made it useful to owners and architects.
Scan-to-BIM exists because renovation dominates architecture: you scan an existing building to make a model, then design on top of it.
A digital twin is not a pretty model. It is a model connected to the outside world, sensors, documents, records, so you can click on a pump and see its history.
You do that by hand first 500 times, 1,000 times, and then you have enough data to have an automatic process.
Dominique Pouliquen