One of the most important trends we’ve covered at Geo Week News over the last few years has been the democratization of laser scanning and, more broadly, the reality capture space. It’s something we’ve talked about extensively at the Geo Week conference in each of the last couple of iterations, and that we’ve written about on this site. There are a lot of layers to democratization, but most simply put we mean that the technology has improved to the point where powerful enough sensors, as well as software, are becoming cheaper and allowing more organizations access to this technology. That can mean different things for different use cases, of course, ranging from some use cases being accessible simply with the lidar sensors now included on the back of iPhones, to the most powerful terrestrial scanners coming in at lower price points.
From an article in Geo Week by Matt Collins.
For the most part, the conversations around this democratization revolve around the surveying and AEC industries, and for completely valid reasons. These are the industries that most benefit from this technology, and opening up powerful technologies for those outside of the top of the space is healthy for the industry as a whole. Construction, for example, has long been seen as averse to new technology, and price is one of the reasons. Now that more firms can more easily access these tools, efficiency for the entire industry rises.
It’s not just those traditional industries that benefit from this democratization, though. In fact, one could argue that we all do.
As someone who covers a wide range of technologies and use cases, much of which revolves around reality capture in some way, shape, or form, among my favorite broad topics is historical preservation. It’s not the first use case we generally think of with regards to laser scanning – or photogrammetry, for that matter – but it’s an incredibly important use case culturally, and one that has also benefited significantly from this democratization process.
We’ve talked briefly about some examples showcasing what increased accessibility looks like with things like traditional scanners becoming cheaper and good-enough (and improving) scanners being added to the most popular smartphones on the market, but that doesn’t even cover the full breadth of this trend. We’re also talking about greater accessibility to complementary hardware, like UAVs, as well as simpler and/or cheaper software to take the collected data and turn it into something usable.
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