Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been highlighting some of the big takeaways and conversations we were fortunate enough to have last week in Stuttgart, Germany during the annual Intergeo conference and exhibition. As is the case for most of these types of events, it’s the hardware that often steals the show, and indeed most of our conversations at the link above revolved around new hardware being released by some of the biggest companies in the geospatial industry. However, any professional in the sector will tell you that hardware is simply a piece of the puzzle, and the tools don’t matter all that much without the software to process, analyze, and share the data collected with them.
To that end, one of our conversations last week was with PointCab, a German company that has been in the industry for over a decade, providing software solutions to process and manage point cloud data. The company has two main offerings – PointCab Origins, for processing point clouds, and PointCab Nebula, for sharing and visualizing point cloud projects in the cloud. At Intergeo, Geo Week News learned a bit more about Nebula 2.0, the upcoming next generation for the latter solution, from the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nicole Herber.
Nebula 2.0 has not yet been fully released, but attendees of Intergeo were able to get some early intel about the company’s new solution in Germany. Herber calls out a few of the standout features of this cloud-based solution, including the fact that customers connect their own cloud to Nebula – i.e. Google Drive – and because PointCab is not hosting the data the user does not need to pay per gigabyte or user. Instead, subscriptions are done on a per-project slot basis. Additionally, Nebula 2.0 includes a free option for users to allow anyone to visualize and share point cloud projects with a link for up to three projects per year.
Herber also notes that customers who also use Origins will be able to export their projects to Nebula directly from Origins, and those who do not use Origins can use a free Nebula Creator tool to prepare the projects using any open format, as well as some others. She says that Nebula 2.0 includes all of the features one would expect from this kind of platform, including the ability to mark points of interest and take measurements, along with support for “2.5-dimension” orthophotos, and the aforementioned per-project pricing method.
PointCab is looking for more interested beta testers, who will be given early access to Nebula 2.0. You can learn more about the software and sign up as a beta tester here.
