Today, we’re excited to share an interview with Shea Gleadle. Shea is a geospatial professional with nearly 20 years of experience in surveying and reality capture. He’s also the creator of the The 3rd Dimension YouTube channel, where he shares free, in-depth educational content for surveyors and geospatial professionals. In our conversation, we explore his unexpected path into the industry, his thoughts on the future of lidar and reality capture, the importance of accessible education, and what fuels his passion for learning and sharing. A big thank you to Shea for taking the time to share his story with all of us!
How did you first get into surveying and reality capture?
I’ve been in the surveying & reality capture field for about 17 years now. Like many others that have made their way into this industry, my journey was the result of dumb luck. During my final year of high school, I went to an info session at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do after high school at the time and I saw a booth labelled Geomatics that looked interesting, so I grabbed a pamphlet from that booth and a few others. I still don’t recall exactly how my wires got crossed, but I was under the assumption Geomatics was mining engineering, which sounded very interesting to me so that’s what I chose to enroll in.
I have a vivid memory of being in math class after a week of other classes that had nothing to do with mining & turned to a classmate & asked him why we’re spending so much time talking about trigonometry. After an alarming conversation & a heart dropping realization, I spoke to my program advisor to which they informed me I would need to wait until the following year to change programs, so I decided to stick it out and see how I liked it. 4 years later I graduated with a degree in Geomatics from BCIT.
How did your career path evolve over time?
I didn’t love surveying right out of the gate. I spent the first six or seven years with a small firm doing typical smaller land surveying jobs in the rainy Pacific Northwest, mostly just going through the motions. Things shifted when I moved to interior British Columbia and started working on UAV photogrammetry and construction layout. I was using what was innovative tech at the time, the pay was solid, and I got to live and work in the breathtaking Okanagan Valley. I started to realize this was a career, not just a job—and I figured if I was going to take it seriously, I should aim to become a professional land surveyor.
I joined a firm that did a mix of drone, scanning, and legal survey work, wrote the entrance exams, and began articling. But after nearly two years behind a desk, drafting legal descriptions and calcing boundaries under fluorescent lights, I knew that wasn’t the life I wanted. At the time, I wrongly believed that becoming a PLS was the only real way forward in this field. If there are any younger aspiring professional reading this, take my word for it, that’s not the only way & if you put in the effort there really is no limit of how far you can take your career with or without a professional accreditation.
So I left and spent two years traveling Western Canada with a bigger firm, doing everything from remote bush work near the Rockies to huge industrial projects. I was working 80+ hour weeks in high stress, demanding situations and I loved it. But I also dreamed of somewhere warmer, with 12 months of sun, beaches as far as the eye can see & some of the best fishing in the world. So I reached out to a Florida-based surveying company leaning heavily towards reality capture, and five months later I was in Orlando. It has undoubtedly been the best decision of my professional life.
What is The 3rd Dimension?
The 3rd Dimension is a YouTube channel whose sole intent is to create zero cost to consumer geospatial related content. I try to focus on providing actionable data that the modern surveyor can use in their day-to-day workflow that is backed in science and mathematics.
We often hear we should capture data this way or use that piece of equipment. But why? Where is the science backing up those assertions? I try my best to take opinion out of my videos and breakdown complex subjects, step by step without glossing over the finer details, which unfortunately results in relatively long videos that can be dry at times but if you’re looking for a quick 3-minute clip that gives a high level overview of a subject, this probably isn’t the channel for you. If you want to dive deep into the math and science on very niche surveying & scanning related topics, well that’s what The 3rd Dimension is all about.
What inspired you to start The 3rd Dimension?
The first video I released was about 2 and a half years ago. I was stuck out of town for a few months doing the as-built and layout on a water supply tunnel project & had some spare time in my evenings that I needed to fill with a project.
I was trying to find a way to clearly explain to clients and coworkers that there is far more to the accuracy of coordinates derived from a total station than its angular accuracy spec. So I spent a few hours every night for a couple weeks writing a program where I could input a bunch of different variables related to a total station’s setup and it would run the error propagation to determine the expected coordinate quality at varying levels of confidence. After I completed it I thought it seemed like such a shame for it to sit on my hard drive and only be used by myself & any coworkers that found value in it, so I decided to edit up a little video explaining what it was, how to use it & I posted that on YouTube with a link where anyone could download it for free.
Nothing really happened, it sat there and got a couple views, but I had a lot of fun doing the whole process. It just kind of slowly built from there. I’d get an idea in my head of something I wanted to explore or topics I felt I had good enough proficiency on to talk about and I would make a video & post it. As time went on the videos went from a couple views to a few hundred to a few thousand.
I guess you could say the inspiration to start the channel was the desire to learn and share. I’ve always received great pleasure from being able to pass on any of the survey knowledge I’ve gained over the years to the people I’ve worked with and been very grateful to those that have done the same for me. Doing so via YouTube just means I get to reach more people than I ever could communicating face to face.
What is the goal of The 3rd Dimension?
The goal of the channel is simply to learn & share gained knowledge. Whether that be diving into the fundamentals of surveying or reality capture. Or doing software and equipment testing and reviews. The goal of the channel has never been an income source, this is strictly a hobby.
Why do you think educational content around lidar and surveying is so important right now?
I think educational geospatial content is especially important now more than ever because with the influx of low-cost surveying tools we’ve seen in the past 5-10 years, I’ve noticed a sizeable jump in the number of newcomers to the industry that aren’t necessarily making their way here though traditional routes such as University or on the job training.
While democratization is positive, what makes me nervous is when someone watches a YouTube video with a message along the lines of “I make $5000/day with this drone” and they get an unrealistic idea that surveying is as easy as planning & flying an autonomous drone flight, dropping their images into some photogrammetry software and delivering the outputs to a client. I’ve seen the ramifications 1st hand that come from not having an in depth understanding of geodesy or how the error in our measurements propagate.
It’s my hope that the newcomers of the industry that aren’t lucky enough to be able to afford a university degree or just don’t have the time, can watch some of my videos and start to wrap their head around these fundamental topics that lead to them continuing their self-guided education.
You mentioned wanting to provide content for people who can’t afford or don’t have time for school,
do you have a series of videos a newcomer could watch?
I don’t have a set of videos that necessarily go in order that can walk someone through the basics of survey and scanning but I do have a Surveying 101 playlist and a 3D Scanning 101 playlist on my channel that are a great place to start. And on that front, even if you only plan on scanning & never actually using a total station or GNSS receiver, I still think a base level of knowledge in surveying is vitally important & would recommend starting there. 3D scanning isn’t really that much different than traditional surveying data capture methods. Sure, they work & handle data quite differently but whether Im using a total station or terrestrial scanner, I’m capturing geospatial data. I still need to understand coordinate systems, mapping projections, error propagation & geoid models among many other topics that are fundamental to the geospatial industry.
What challenges do professionals face in this industry and how can they be overcome?
Data extraction time. We can capture data pretty fast these days but the relatively slow methods to extract useable information from our scan data means total stations & GNSS receivers can be a much more efficient means of data acquisition on some jobs because of the time it takes to get to the data we actually want when we scan.
Now it really doesn’t take much time to process some aerial lidar data and create a ground surface. But when we start talking about vectorizing data or building BIM objects… the office time can often be multiple times longer than data acquisition.
To a new client, it can be hard to explain why the cost to scan their facility is $20,000 but to extract the model they want from it, they may be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple months to get the data back. This is often where the initial excitement about new technology built on 3D point clouds starts to wear off.
How can this be overcome? Well of course there is outsourcing modelling work and other feature extraction offshore where labor is much cheaper & a team of people can work on a single project at one time. But that comes with its own set of obstacles and drawbacks.
It’s my hope that this inefficiency can be resolved with innovative software that can effectively perform automatic feature extraction. In my talks with various developers in the industry, there are some very exciting advancements on this field that are right on the horizon. And rest assured as soon as I get my hands on something worthwhile there will be a video exploring and testing it.
What were the biggest challenges in starting a geospatial-focused YouTube channel?
There really haven’t been many challenges in starting the channel to be honest. Near the beginning it was more difficult to get a reply from manufacturers of equipment or software that I wanted to test and review for the channel but that has since flipped and it’s starting to be really difficult to keep up with offers to test out & review new scanners or software packages. Which is a fantastic problem to have.
Many technical professionals aren’t used to content creation. What have you learned about producing videos and making complex topics engaging?
One thing I’ve learnt from making these videos is trying to explain a complex subject is a lot more difficult than I initially thought & I definitely have a newfound respect for those that can do it well. I’m doing the best I can by using visuals and trying to take each step slow & explain my line of thought but if you watch a seminar from someone like Dave Doyle or Cyrill Stachniss and then watch one of my videos, there is absolutely no comparison. Maybe I’ll get there one day or maybe it’s something you just do or don’t have but at least I can try to learn from some the greats and do my best to follow in their footsteps.
What kind of feedback have you received from industry professionals?
The feedback I’ve received from industry professionals has been overwhelmingly supportive. And the relatively minor criticism I have received has been almost always constructive and usually turns into a new connection and learning experience for myself.
One of the unforeseen perks of making these videos has been the connections I’ve made with some of the great minds within our industry. Being able to have one on one conversations with some of the living legends from the Geospatial community has been invaluable, motivating and extremely educational.
Has The 3rd Dimension changed the way you approach your own work?
Since I’m constantly learning as almost every video I make has an R&D aspect to it, there has been a huge impact on my day-to-day work at my current Monday to Friday job. My absolute favorite videos to make are ones that involve a hypothesis and that I get to test to see if the data backs it up or not. Sometimes the initial assumption was correct and other times it wasn’t. Either way, the experiments I’ve got to do have helped me learn a lot & that has directly benefited my day-to-day workflow. For example, the results from the terrestrial scanner control density video I made were not at all what I was expecting and have impacted the way I approach terrestrial scanning jobs now.
Looking ahead, how do you see surveying/lidar technology evolving, and where do you want to take The 3rd Dimension next?
I think that once we can streamline data extraction from point clouds, most data acquisition in the surveying industry will probably be performed by some kind of remote sensing device. Of course, there will always be need for total stations and GNSS receivers, but I believe the days of doing topos, ALTA’s & as-builts with a total station as the primary method of data capture are probably limited. We can already capture data much faster vs GNSS or total stations 9 times out of 10 but the data extraction time can often erase the time savings experienced in the field.
I think SLAM scanning technology will probably see a lot more attention compared to other forms of scanning and start to eat up more & more of the market as sensors and registration algorithms improve.
And I also think the real breakthrough that will truly change the industry will come from software, not hardware. We already have efficient, accurate scanning technology. But manually modelling or digitizing point clouds is really holding back industry acceptance of reality capture at the moment. But like I said earlier, things are starting to change, and these days I get far less excited about another handheld SLAM scanner coming into the market vs a new automatic feature extraction algorithm that actually works and reduces office time several fold.
Where do you want to take The 3rd Dimension next?
I want to do exactly what I’m doing now. Find subjects that interest me in the Geospatial world, figure out everything I can about them and share it with the industry. I want to bust myths. I want to help people increase their efficiency. And above all, I want to learn and share that knowledge with anyone that’s willing to listen. This channel has been an absolute blast from the get go & to anyone that’s given up your free time by tuning in, I really appreciate it and hopefully you’ve found some value in it.
Want to check out Shea’s youtube channel? Click Here!
