Category Archives: Lidar/Imaging

iPhone Pro 12 – Survey device??

There is a buzz on the underground, geospatial people are tweeting about lidar in the new iPhone 12 Pro. What really escalated it all was Matterport releasing a new scan app on the Apple store, it was then followed by a few geospatial people alluding to be able to scan cities and even map rooms...

As-Built Documentation with Speed and Accuracy

Most architects, designers and engineers are aware of reality capture technology and laser scanning but might not be sure how it could fit into their workflow, especially when it comes to as-built documentation. To get a better sense of how this technology works with as-built documentation, let’s first recap what reality capture means in the...

Herman Strydom and associate Guillaume van der Walt take a break and look out over the southern Atlantic Ocean with the RIEGL VZ-2000i on the remote Namibia coast. The remains are a part of Pomona, once a thriving diamond mining town in the African Sperrgebiet.

Geospatial Adventure: Ghost Towns and Diamond Mine Memories

Diamond mine memories: A century or so ago, miners in the small settlement of Pomona pulled 50,000 carats of diamonds a month from the vast, arid nothingness of land called the Sperrgebiet—10,000 square miles of coastal desert in southwestern Namibia in Africa.  The sandy ground has long since given up the last of its precious...

The Early Days of 3D Scanning, Part 5

Joining the 3D Laser Scanning Pioneering Start-up, Cyra Technologies Thus far in my “insider story” series (June, July, August, September), I have described how, while working for Trimble in 1996, I first became aware of the technology and Cyra Technologies, a pioneering start-up developing it. After a jaw-dropping demo, I dove into evaluating the technology and Cyra for a...

Daenerys; Dothraki; Dubrovnik: How 3D Scanning Built a Game of Clones

How lidar imaging turned Dubrovnik Old Town, Croatia, into a realistic fantasy world! The sight of King’s Landing, the capital and largest city of the Seven Kingdoms, is spectacular. The population found within verges on half a million but from a bird’s eye view, it is serene and calm, with the gentle sounds of Blackwater Bay in the...