In This Issue • The Pace of Change • Mobile Mapping • Revealing the Secrets of Stonehenge • Connecting the Dots • High Accuracy Survey with a Helicopter • Thinking Beyond Our Senses • FARO User Conference • It’s About Time
Disruption is Good When Innovating: Joe Croser – For most people ‘disruption’ is an unwelcome thing. Bad weather disrupts air travel and naughty children disrupt classrooms. But there are some disruptions that are, for the most part, positive and welcome. Thought leaders and academics tend to think of these as disruptive innovations. If you work in the high-tech ...
Sign Retroreflectivity Compliance and Asset Management: Jason Amadori – Over the past few years, there have been many projects designed to determine an agency’s sign retroreflectivity compliance across their road network. Each project has been unique in terms of how the agency collected the data and how they ultimately managed the data into the future ...
The PDAL Project: Michael Gerlek – Six months ago in this column, I described libLAS, an open source C++ library that provides classes for reading and writing the various versions and point formats of the LAS standard. At the time, we noted that it wasn’t sufficient for everyone’s needs: it was designed around the LAS format specifically, it didn’t offer a general processing pipeline ...
American Surveyor LiDAR Content
BIM Gets a Boost
The 1.2 million-square-foot Music City Center in Nashville will have plenty of design features and spaces for visitors to talk about when it is scheduled to open in February 2013: The multifunction exhibit hall covers 350,000 square feet, or about eight acres; the grand ballroom contains 57,500 square feet and the junior ballroom .... Read the Article
CyArk: Digitally Preserving a Wahi Pana
During the first week of December 2010 I was lucky to escape the drizzly rain and fog of San Francisco winter (not that it's much different from our summer) and fly to the sun-kissed beaches of the Big Island of Hawai'i. It was going to be a week in a tropical paradise, but with a busy agenda ahead there were no plans for hammocks or Mai Tais. I arrived ... Read the Article
Data Mine—From Limestone Mine to National Archives Storage
Imagine you are charged with this task: Accurately survey the interior of a limestone mine cut into the base of a bluffa cave with vast expanses, irregular surfaces and no light. Collect data on enough individual points to create a meaningful model of the space so that it can be designed and built for warehousing and storage. The challenge would be .... Read the Article
Driving the Islands
When the Public Works department for Washington state's San Juan County was challenged with identifying and mapping roadside assets in an effort to improve traffic safety, it responded by sending out crews with hand-held GPS units. They quickly realized both the scope such a project entailed and the overall inefficiency of using that technique. Knowing the importance of the effort, however ... Read the Article
Conference Review: Hexagon User Conference 2011
What is Hexagon and what is the business of Hexagon? A company that decades ago was "importing tuna fish," according to CEO Ola Rollén, is now a key international player in geospatial products and services, metrology, design and process; this by acquiring and integrating a long list of established companies successful in their own .... Read the Article
Mapping Interior Space with Speed, Ease & Accuracy
New technology quickly delivers interior geospatial data to cross discipline groups for multiple purposes, such as Situational Awareness and Building Information Modeling. Documenting the precise order and condition of indoor ... Read the Article
Editorial: SPAR 2011
Gene Roe, the editor of LiDAR News, and I attended the eighth annual SPAR, held outside Houston, and as always, it was well worth our time. A record 800+ attendees, 20 percent of whom were from outside the U.S., met and learned about the latest and greatest in laser scanning, photogrammetry, and ... Read the Article
Using the Lynx Mobile Mapper to Survey a Levee
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, leaving in its wake an unprecedented loss of life and property damage. Among the critical infrastructure the storm impacted was the levee system that controls the Mississippi River's flow around the city of New Orleans. In the aftermath of this most destructive storm .... Read the Article
Conference Review: Moving Forward—2010 Leica Geosystems HDS Worldwide User Conference
This year's Leica HDS User Conference once again raised the bar for return on investment in terrestrial 3D laser scanning conferences. With attendance approaching 300, up some ... Read the Article
Laser Scanning Mushpot Cave
The concept for this project was hatched in the brilliance-inducing state one achieves by moving rapidly between the dim, flickering ambiance of a GIS computer screen and the dim, flickering ambiance of a bat-filled lava tube cave, which .... Read the Article
Reach our audience of Professional land surveyors and Geo-Technology professionals with your career ad. Feel free to contact us if you need additional information.
for the PageFlip full version of the magazine.
New! iPad Enabled 
