Having spent 3 days last week immersed in the transportation industry it seems to me that there is a significant opportunity for improvement in the solution being offered to transportation agencies. At best we are in the early stages of development by the vendors, but what worries me is that it will take the rest of this decade to get there.
The transportation agencies need to geospatially manage their assets. Point clouds should be just an intermediate step in the total solution, not the end product. The agencies need 3D intelligent objects, not terabytes of 3D point data.
The automotive industry abandoned the use of point clouds 10+ years ago in favor of surface modeling. Granted, there’s is a much different world – cars vs. the Built Environment, but we can do better.
I have to agree Gene. As company that comes from providing reverse engineering and inspection services in the mechanical engineering sector. Whenever we talk to Civil Engineers they are bowled over with our ability to easily provide 3D CAD assets from point cloud data. Something that architectural based CAD packages seem too cumbersome to do.
Absolutely true. When DelftTech satrted with laserscanning in 1998 (!) we concentrated on the scans, the pointclouds as the main delivery, later it was the 3D CAD model only (early 2000) and then again because of costs of the modeling it went on to modeling only the nescessary objects and combining it with the rest (the pointcloud) to do e.g. clash detection. For the last 5 yrs we are focussed much more on the needs of the customer: not pointclouds but intelligent 3D models. Laserscanning (pointclouds) is just a tool to get to the real thing: the 3D intelligent models. So we gained a step: from non-intelligent CAD models to intelligent models!
Willem van Spanje
DelftTech
Could not be more true. We have been laser scanning since 2005 and have encountered all the above issues. I would be interested in some pointers for software for intelligent 3D models. Any samples on websites?
Trevor Wilson
Scadin Surveys