New Scanning Technology

Some of you may already be on top of this, but for those of you that aren’t this is going to be a big deal for our models. Bascially the iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro’s have Lidar which allow for live aqcuistion of surfaces by collecting point clouds that are visible on the screen. I will be working on merging point clouds between this and our drone scans, but there is quite a bit of coordinate geometry that needs to be tied together so we will see how that goes.

Check out this company that I will be working with.

I wonder if this could be used to make virtual tours of the inside of commercial buildings and warehouses! I see that DD is going to be integrating the technology to do virtual tours like Matterport does now. I hope they don’t just offer this feature to Enterprise customers because that gets old!

I agree, if you are paying for a business subscription you are obviously going to do things that businesses want and in the drone realm that means development. Whether it be engineering, construction or real estate these are the types of things that we are moving towards.

There are a lot of moving parts taking shape right now that are going to be a huge game changer in how much drone and 3D technology influences the way we build things. Many other sources of information are going to either go away or learn how to integrate. Matterport and Multivista do a good job of integrating drone data into development plans and facilities logistics. Interior tours are generating point clouds and some are even measurable which will become more common place in the near future.

In my opinion the biggest hurdle is going to be integrating all this data into one master model. Reprojection of the imagery onto the more precise point clouds has always been tough in scanning, but the more important step is getting the individual models to align to each other in a single space on a specific desired coordinate system. I am fairly confident that this is going to lead back to GCP’s so once again RTK’ers you are not going to get rid of Ground Control Points. As we have been continuing RTK/PPK has just allowed for less of them.

Michael, I am familiar with the Lidar on iOS devices and thanks for bringing it to community’s attention. So far what I have seen is that it is very short range because Apple designed it for a better camera experience (focus in extreme low light) and for ARkit. Can you share what your end goal is in mapping the lidar data to your drone data for construction? Inside and outside of a building? If so, I know someone who may be able to help.

With the iOS devices in particular we are working on the enhancement of the perimeters of buildings and civil drainage structures. Building interiors are captured with 360 cameras and a basic photogrammetry process as we do with the drones to create a point cloud, but you get the street view feel walkthrough. DroneDeploy already has this workflow.

The current testing is introducing control points into the Lidar scan that can be also identified in the Drone scan so that the point clouds can be merged together in post-processing using specialized software.

I’d be happy to speak with anyone you have to trade ideas and fill them in on what we are planning.