Abley’s work with Doppelmayr announced a winner in 2022 ACE NZ Awards

It’s a great honour to have our Digital Engineering work alongside Doppelmayr NZ, recognised as a 2022 ACE Award Winner.

Queenstown, one of New Zealand’s premier tourist destinations, is an ideal setting for the development of a large-scale public transport intervention. Due to its alpine topography and limited road networks, off-road transport solutions have been considered to meet increasing resident and visitor transport expectations. 

This includes the proposal for a new gondola development that would take people from Frankton up to the summit of the Remarkables mountain range and down to the ski base. Doppelmayr were ambitious in their plan for a gondola that extended and traversed across varying terrain, which would enhance the tourism offering of Queenstown and the prospects of the resort town. They wanted visualisation tools which could showcase their proposal with a real-world view, rather than the 2D static views they had previously used to showcase their pitch.  

Abley responded to the consulting challenge, prioritising the clients’ need to communicate their vision (and the dynamics and impacts of the development) – and by putting the client in the ‘director’s chair’ of the final model – delivering a highly sophisticated result on time, without stress, and to budget.  

Abley’s technical team used raw data from the client, along with BIM data, drone capture, LIDAR, and GIS databases to build a sophisticated georeferenced digital twin of the surrounding environment and gondola structures informing the design and impacts of this engineering feat. The resulting model was cinematically produced, including realistic rendering that effectively communicated the vision of the client to support their stakeholder engagement. 

This project shows that any company, anywhere, can deliver world leading outputs at a fraction of the cost, time, and effort of more traditional approaches by using data, technical innovation, and by working closely with an ambitious client with a clear vision. It’s a testament to Abley’s consulting excellence that Doppelmayr have now adopted this technology for all their project pitches.

They noted that the solution provided by Abley was “perfect amalgamation of technology and capability.”