Hexagon Media Roundtable: A Smarter World for All

On Wednesday 13 July, Hexagon organised an ISPRS Congress media roundtable. The meeting clearly showed that the geospatial industry is transforming rapidly as it is involved in people’s everyday life. In an era of digital reality the products Hexagon develops need to fulfill other demands than, say, a decade ago. It was an inspiring update of what’s going on in the mind-blogging industry of photogrammetry and remote sensing. Hexagon has a clear philosophy of how their technology can help planet Earth forward.

(By Wim van Wegen, GIM International)

Smart City

The geospatial landscape has changed dramatically. These days, everyone is using geospatial data – think of smart maps. High-quality, inexpensive data is a key factor for where the sector is going. One of the buzzwords these days is Smart City. Intergeo, the largest geomatics trade show of the world, will this year have a strong focus on this topic. Ruedi Wagner explained that Hexagon basically provides the base layout for the Smart city concept.

UAVs

Another major  development adding to the geomatics spectrum has been the rise of the drones, known as UAVs in surveying. John Welter believes that eventually every surveyor will have a UAV, whether this takes 2, 3 or 5 years. Two years ago Hexagon acquired Aibotix, a manufacturer of intelligent multicopter systems, which added a new dimension to the company’s portfolio. UAVs will be an excellent city mapper, although most cities don’t allow surveyors to fly yet. But in the end everything will work out, legislation for UAVs will come.

Hybrid technology

Leica Geosystems recently launched Leica CityMapper as part of the RealCity 3D reality capture solution, enabling professionals to collect and process imaging and Lidar data in a single sensor. Combining CityMapper and Leica HxMap, the scalable post-processing workflow software, RealCity is designed to simplify and streamline the creation of all 2D and 3D information layers.  Ruedi Wagner commented: “Imaging alone has gaps. We are always looking for technologies that support imaging and that add quality. We want it faster, more accurate and, very important for our customers, we aim at reducing costs.”

Photon Lidar

Another exiting development is single photon Lidar. Hexagon acknowledges this and bought Sigma Space early 2016. Marcos Sirota, CEO at Sigma, told us passionately about the really revolutionary aspect of this technology, which is used by NASA. The next mapping mission for the polar caps (ICESat) will be equipped with photon Lidar technology , enabling it to push the limits of precision, which is exactly what Sigma Space set out to do with its impressive single photon Lidar (SPL) Earth-imaging technology.

This extremely exciting media roundtable covered many other subjects, ranging  from how to attract more students to geospatial studies, the role of the gaming industry in relation to geomatics,  to airborne Lidar for detecting ancient sites under the canopy and other applications for Hexagon products.

Intergeo 2016 will be held from 11-13 October in Hamburg, Germany.

Ruedi Wagner is vice president of Leica Geosystems.

John Welter is president of the geospatial solutions division at Leica Geosystems.