Geo Week 2024 kicked off on Sunday, with the annual Product Preview presentations starting the event in full force. The presentations were split between two rooms, with each participating company getting 15 minutes to discuss their newest products and innovations. The products on display during these presentations ranged from hardware used to map large areas, payloads for drone-enabled surveying and mapping projects, and software to help process this data and deliver data in a presentable fashion. This is part two of a series looking at the day's presentations. You can check out part one here.
Stitch3D
Stitch3D founder and CEO Clark Yuan explained his company’s Rapid Airfield Damage Assessment system (RADAS). Developed through his firm’s work with military clients, RADAS, he said, addresses the problem of “upstream data access” by using lidar to capture 3D data, which can be quickly accessed and shared by professionals across many fields. Stich3D’s approach, Yuan asserted, can perform tasks that once took three to ten hours in just 90 minutes.
Pix4D
During the Product Preview session, representatives from Pix4D showcased their company’s PIX4Dcatch RTK system. Offering 3D scanning and an augmented reality platform for mobile devices, the RTK can provide 3D scanning with photogrammetry for construction projects, help public safety professionals capture fast, accurate data for investigations, and more. Pix4D also highlighted their company’s extensive training, onboarding, and consulting services for RTK customers.
Flai
Flai presented its systems for processing point clouds with artificial intelligence (AI). Using the company’s web application and its command line interface, professionals engaged in aerial mapping, mobile mapping, and forestry projects can improve the quality of their data while saving time and money. The company boasted its 90%-plus accuracy rates for a variety of mapping projects, and it touted its “flexible deployment” options for customers, including self-hosted and “as a service” options.
Blue Marble Geographics
Making the first presentation in their room, Jenna Nelson spoke about the Blue Marble Geographic’s Global Mapper offering. The lidar and photogrammetry data processing software includes standard and pro offerings, with new features having been added last year and more being added in the coming weeks. Among the features highlighted in Nelson’s presentation were new GNSS support, dynamic hill shading, and 3D features. They also looked ahead to some new features being added to the program later this month, including Pixels-to-Points in Pro, which takes in photos with overlapping coverage and generates a 3D point cloud output using photogrammetry methods of structure from motion (SFM).
Cintoo
Cintoo CEO Dominique Poliquen talked about their flagship product, Cintoo Cloud. The software specializes in creating digital twins to bridge the gap between physical and virtual spaces. He discussed their ability to turn point clouds into meshes, and doing so with file sizes 10-20 times smaller. Poliquen also discussed the idea of the “industrial metaverse,” something that has been growing and requires the kind of software like Cintoo provides. In terms of features highlighted in the presentation, he pointed to some new additions like automatic face blurring, new import and export capabilities, and a new teleportation capability to move through a digital site with the click of a button, just as one would in a video game.
TopoDOT
Speaking for TopoDOT was Jennifer Triana, a lidar specialist and business development director with the company. Triana spoke about the point cloud processing capabilities of the company’s software, first introducing the base capabilities to those who may be unfamiliar and then getting into some of the newest additions for more experienced users. Much of the presentation focused on TopoDOT’s feature extraction capabilities, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to make that process as simple as possible. In terms of new additions, those capabilities are being added to sidewalk feature extraction as well, enabling even more inspection and automotive workflows than ever before.
Hexagon
For their presentation, Lecia Geosystems, part of Hexagon, made dual presentations with Layton Hobbs and Anders Ekeland splitting the time between the two. Hobbs took the stage first and focused on Leica’s aerial imagery capabilities, and more specifically the Country Mapper. Released last summer, this is the first time the aerial imagery tool has been featured at Geo Week, and it includes both imagery and lidar sensors within the same unit to allow the data collection in one pass-through. After that, Ekeland spoke about the company’s bathymetric scanning tools, specifically the Chiroptera-5 and the Hawkeye-5, their newest scanners on the market.
