Engineering · 4 November 2025
BIM in your back pocket: lessons from a year of mobile-first BIM
A field report from twelve months of putting full BIM models on phones and tablets — what worked, what didn't, what we'd do again.
A year ago we set ourselves a challenge: could a site engineer interrogate a 4GB IFC model on a £300 Android tablet, in the rain, with one bar of signal? Spoiler — yes, but only after a lot of streaming-mesh work.
Our biggest lesson: the model isn't the point. Engineers want answers, not geometry. Most queries reduce to 'which element is this?' and 'what does the spec say?'. Optimise for those and the rest falls into place.
We've open-sourced our streaming viewer thresholds in case it helps anyone else.
Written by Urban Software Studio
