All posts by Kevin Lidtka

Tunnel Vision

Dis-located What do you think of all this new technology? Do you love it? Do you fear it?  Does it keep advancing faster than you can keep up?  In our industries, new technology usually means change.  We will probably need to learn something new to make this new thing work.  That’s a good thing, right? ...

Software Review: Terrain Navigator Pro, Revisited

One of the most powerful productivity-boosting tools these days is probably that little machine right there in your pocket. Plenty gets written about how “mobile is taking over the world.” You’ve probably seen your smart phone changing the way you do your work, or maybe it has in ways you haven’t realized—and you could do...

Feature: Discovering Lee’s View

A geography professor uses GIS to recreate the Battle of Gettysburg, discovering what General Lee could and could not have seen to guide his fateful decisions.  Advances in tech-nology in the last 150 years have been remarkable. In our industry we have seen many changes in our surveying methods and in mapping practices in general....

Pix4D Mapper

Imagine walking up to an object with practically any camera and taking photos of it at different angles. Now imagine uploading those images onto a computer and being able to create a survey-accurate point cloud. Sounds impossible, huh? Too good to be true? That’s what I thought when I first heard of Pix4D. When I...

Reality Show Material

So when are they going to do a reality show about us scanner jockeys? The ship owner (I’ll call him Bill) flew me up to Alaska specifically for this project and told me not to worry about anything, that he would arrange for my food and boarding. Usually that means I’m put in a nice...

Chillon Castle: A Pix4D Sample Project

Above picture: Point cloud of full model of castle, shown from the top I wrote a review of Pix4D’s Mapper software in the November print issue of xyHt; check it out. Here’s Pix4D’s sample project to showcase the power of their software. They chose to create a model of Switzerland’s most visited site: the Chillon...