Geo Week 2024 is right around the corner, once again promising to bring together the geospatial industry and built world for a three-day event in Denver, Colorado. As always, the event will include plenty of networking opportunities, an exhibit hall floor packed with both new and exciting companies in the industry as well as the stalwarts, and of course a diverse and informative conference program with presentations and panel discussions covering all corners of the industry.
One of the more unique sessions taking place in Denver this year will be at the Exhibit Hall Theater, when the United States Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD) takes the stage to compare results of mobile scans from a variety of different companies and products, which will have been completed earlier in the weekend.
This will be the second consecutive year the USIBD has held an event like this at Geo Week, with the group presenting last year data from a variety of different terrestrial laser scanners. For that event, scanners from different companies were used to scan different materials in a designated location on the exhibit floor. On the final day of the event, they presented the resulting data from companies for those in attendance to compare depending on their potential needs. The group also discussed broader goals for the organization, including their desire to create a standardized spec sheet for these types of scanners.
While this year’s presentation will be similar to last year, there are crucial differences with the processes and equipment being tested. This year, in addition to data from terrestrial scanners, USIBD will be presenting data collected from mobile systems, mapping corridors in the Colorado Convention Center in the days leading up to the event. In Tuesday’s session, Chris Kercheval told Geo Week News that USIBD will be presenting the data from participating companies, along with other crucial pieces of information such as the time it took to process the data, what software was necessary, and how the data performed against ideal conditions.
Kercheval, the founder and CEO for TopKerv Consulting who will be hosting this session on behalf of USBID, made clear to Geo Week News the goals of this event, and just as importantly what the goals are not. While this session will be presenting data from the different companies, the aim is to do so completely neutrally, all on the same terms, for those in the audience to make their own conclusions. There will be no rankings or anything similar coming from USIBD. In addition to the presentation on-site at Geo Week 2024, the USIBD will also be subsequently releasing a report with all of the information presented, and more.
Instead, Kercheval relays that the hope is for this session to provide critical information for those who are relatively new to these systems and collecting this type of data. As these mobile systems become both more accessible and more powerful, more end users will look to take advantage of their capabilities but may not know where to start. The aim of this session is to look at that entire onboarding process for new users, looking at everything from cost, performance, software requirements, and even customer service.
“It’s just the facts. Here’s what we got: Product A costs this much. It’s software-as-a-service. It took this long to collect this data, this long to process. Here’s the accuracy to an ideal condition,” Kercheval said. “We’ll do that for all of them so someone can open it up and basically put them side-by-side.”
The list of potential vendors participating in the event include:
- AutoMap
- FARO
- FJDynamics
- GeoSLAM
- Green Valley
- Mosaic
- NavVis
- RIEGL
- Stonex
- Surphaser
- Topcon
- Trimble
- Z+F
- Emesent
- Exyn
The USIBD Laser Scanning Results session will take place at the Exhibit Hall Theater on Tuesday, February 13 starting at 12:30 PM Mountain Time, and may be attended by anyone with an exhibit hall pass. Additionally, attendees with a conference pass may attend the USIBD’s other session, Future-Proofing Your Workflow for Lidar Data Capture, which will be moderated by Kercheval and take place February 12 from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Mountain Time.
