Lens is BIMIO's free dashboard: a panel that docks beside your model, follows every selection, and stacks in one place everything the suite knows about it — the identity Revit buries in a modal, who created it and who owns it now, and a live card from every BIMIO app with something to say about that element. No setup, no run button, no cost: it is free with any BIMIO app, in Revit 2024–2027.
One element's story lives in six places — a modal for its id, a dialog for its warnings, a window per add-in — and none of them follow your selection.
Lens has two halves. The input is just your selection — the apps have already done their work. The output is everything they know, stacked beside the model: the facts, the cards, the brief, the memory, the file.
Tap Input or Output to isolate a half — the other collapses.
The panel docks like any Revit pane and refreshes on every selection. The only pinned controls are the scope — Project, Element or Type — a search box, the finder, one AI button and the HTML export.
The docked panel refreshes on every selection with no run button. Scope pills — Project, Element, Type — set how far it looks; the master search filters every card below; and the finder button browses the elements you can't click in the model: view templates, view filters, project information. GENERAL INFO opens the stack with the Id first — no modal to open — then where the element sits, then Authorship: Created by, Last Changed by — and Owned by, shown only while someone actually has the element checked out — each with the person's colour dot.
Canon's rule breaches, Ledger's keynote, the saved Select rules the element matches, Clash, Assay, Palette, Dictum, Datum, Stencil, Loop, Nest, Trace and the Misc helpers — each a card in its app's own brand. The always-on cards — Canon, Clash, Assay, Trace, Ledger — give a clean element an honest empty instead of silence; the automatic ones appear only when they have something true to say. An app you don't own shows a quiet lock with the way to change that, and Open ↗ on any card jumps into the full app — the card informs, the app acts.
A view template, a filter, a workset, Project Information: they are elements, people change them, and there is nothing in the model to select. Find hidden elements lists the whole model by category — every type under its family with a “— Types” row of its own, and anything Revit gives no category listed under the class name it has inside Revit — and hands any of it to the Lens panel. The window stays open while you browse, so you can walk a list of suspects one at a time and see, for each, who touched it and when.
Lens runs nothing of its own — the apps did the work when they ran. The only writes are the ones you click: a Canon Fix, a parameter you edit in the card, a value you restore, a view range you drag, a ghost marker you later clear.
Everything below the cards is optional depth: an AI reading of the panel, Chronicle's memory when you license it, and an HTML dossier for whoever isn't in Revit.
The pinned ✦ Explain button asks BIMIO Synapse — your connected AI — to explain everything below in plain language. The result is the AI brief card at the top of the scroll: a grounded summary you can dismiss with ✕ or open in full with “Tap for the full brief →”. It reads what the panel and its history already know, so the brief can never know more than you can verify.
An exterior-function brick wall on Level 01, created by jsmith and now free to edit. Canon flags its function against the house standard — the Fix button on the card resolves it. Its keynote and two saved Select rules agree it is an exterior wall.
The card at the top of the panel is the short answer. Opening it gives the long one, in four parts: what it is, its lifecycle with who and when, the risks it carries and what to do next. It is the same grounded material — the facts already on screen — laid out to be read rather than glanced at, and it says on its own face that it is generated: verify before acting. Nothing here is a new fact. They are the ones you already had, in a paragraph.
With Chronicle licensed, a bronze card — CHRONICLE · Activity & history — joins the stack: Live Activity showing who is editing what, polled every 30 seconds; History with every sync's created, modified and deleted rows, searchable and filterable; Journals reading your own session's commands, local only, never shared; What changed since any recorded sync; and How it was built, painting the view by rework, age, author, settledness or hands. Chronicle records; Lens is where you read it beside the selection — the live sections each with their own I/O toggle.
Inside the Chronicle card, Deleted Elements keeps every recorded deletion: what it was, when it went, where it stood — and, for teams running BIMIO, who deleted it, recorded in the deleter's own session rather than guessed; older rows say Unknown honestly. Recreate plants a temporary marker at the last-known spot so you can see the hole before deciding, and Finish inspection removes every marker before anything reaches the file.
In the Family Editor the project cards stand down and the panel becomes the family dashboard: the Mold card sums the family in one line — category, types, parameters, shared count — and Run health grades every type on demand: unused parameters, hardcoded formulas, types with blanks, naming. The full types × parameters matrix is one Open ↗ away in Mold itself, and Nest sits beside it with the nesting story.
HTML exports what you are looking at: an element or type dossier, or — in Project scope — a self-contained dashboard with a health score out of 100, people, hotspots, deletions, the inventory and — with your connected AI — a summary written for humans. No install, no viewer, works offline. The change audit rides a Chronicle licence; without one the report says so plainly and ships everything Lens reads for free.
Revit reports a teammate as a raw Autodesk username, which is not what anybody calls them. Type a friendly name once and it replaces the raw one everywhere in Live Activity and History; the real username is still stored underneath, so nothing you rename can break a lookup later. And the history itself can be pooled: point the project at a shared folder and every collaborator's Lens publishes its own changes there and reads the others'. The path lives IN THE MODEL, so a teammate who opens it inherits the setting without configuring anything on their machine.
The panel is not read-only. Change a value and, if the model carries a Canon rule for that parameter, Lens offers the rule's own values and says where you stand as you type. It never blocks you: an enforced rule warns that Canon will flag the value, a suggesting one says so plainly and lets it through. A parameter can also be handed over to a global parameter, so Revit drives it from then on — and the same dialog is where you break that link again, keeping the value it had.
This is an actual HTML report Lens exports — self-contained, works offline, shareable as one file. Scroll it right here, or open it full-screen.
Lens is free with any BIMIO app — dock it, click something, and see what your suite already knows. Revit 2024–2027.