FARO Technologies is already among the leaders worldwide in reality capture solutions, and earlier this year made a big announcement expanding those capabilities when they acquired mobile mapping specialist GeoSLAM. Before this year comes to a close, they’ve broadened that scope even more, starting off December with an announcement that they have acquired SiteScape, who specializes in working with lidar-equipped mobile devices.
Among the bigger developments in the reality capture space over the last couple of years, as detailed at Geo Week News, has been the improved accessibility of the hardware. Some of that is tied to newer Apple products starting to incorporate lidar scanners on their iPhones and iPads. While these scanners are certainly not producing the same quality as high-range terrestrial scanners and other more expensive equipment, for certain projects they can generate the data required.
SiteScape is one of the companies helping users get the most out of that data and were among the first apps to take advantage of the accessible technology. They’ve been focused on improving in key areas based on company feedback, including targeting more use cases for professionals as well as allowing for accurate scans of larger areas.
By now bringing SiteScape into the fold, FARO continues to add a broader set of tools available for their customer base, and potentially can add more customers into their fold. In addition to the newly-added capabilities around lidar-equipped mobile devices from Apple, FARO Technologies also allows access to 360-degree photo, video, mobile mapping, and terrestrial laser scanning as reality capture methods for their users.
FARO’s customer base includes firms in the AEC and facility management spaces, and this kind of low-resolution lidar scanning ability can be a valuable addition to a firm’s scanning toolkit. Other offerings already included with FARO, like terrestrial scanners, can be used for accurate scanning of the outside of structures, and the lidar-enabled mobile scanners provide an easy-to-use method to capture indoor spaces for things like period checks on a space.
While this acquisition will bring current value to FARO and their customer base now by adding another reality capture technique to be integrated into a customer’s workflow, it also likely serves as a future-looking move as well. Presumably, the market around lidar-equipped mobile devices is only going to grow in terms of both scope and quality, and SiteScape is among the leaders in deriving real-world value from that accessible hardware. That should give them, and now FARO, a head start in making the most out of any future developments in the space.
On this move, FARO President and CEO Michael Burger said, “We are pleased to add SiteScape and its groundbreaking 3D LiDAR scanning software to our portfolio of reality capture solutions. With millions of LiDAR-enabled mobile devices already in the market, the addition of SiteScape opens up a significant population of users to the benefits of FARO’s reality capture solutions.”
Andy Putch, SiteScape CEO, added, “I’m excited to add SiteScape’s proprietary software to the FARO family of cloud-based offerings. FARO accelerates our vision of enabling a broad set of customers with the ability to gain critical insights from their digital reality environments.”
As of this writing, the financial terms of the acquisition have not been publicly disclosed.
