GISCafé industry predictions 2023 – PRESAGIS

By, Jean-Michel Brière, President, PRESAGIS

Jean-Michel Brière

As the world moves forward and out of the most uncertain times in recent history, the industry enters 2023 with optimism and the hope that technology continues to play a pivotal role in its evolution. Geopolitical unrest, climate change and other global issues are prompting governments and the private sector to look at geospatial technologies to help inform and solve some of the biggest problems we’re currently facing.

The predictions below focus on four technologies as the main levers of that evolution: 3D data, the Metaverse, Simulation and AI.

3D Geospatial data will become a commodity

• More and more providers are including 3D data in their offerings either free of charge or low cost, particularly buildings footprints. Democratization of its access is now on the way
• 3D data makes complexity look easier, when the representation of geospatial data takes into consideration the accuracy of such data
• 3D data facilitates the proper development of simulation. For example, for flooding simulation (how water will spread, accelerate, change course, etc.)
• 3D mapping and visualization will bridge the gap between experts’ knowledge and stakeholders together with decision makers
• 3D Data puts upfront geographical data in context as a truly geospatial representation of a region
• Photogrammetry and LiDAR will enable stakeholders to take better decisions by visualizing information within relevant context, as an accurate representation of the real world
• Modelling reality requires accurate data, and LiDAR will provide just that.

The rise of the Metaverse and digital twins

• Geolocation becomes core to the Metaverse
• After some disappointment in 2022, the Metaverse will find its niche with professional business applications
• VR and AR technologies will become more prevalent and accessible
• The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry will use Building Information Modeling (BIM) more and more to build models with higher realism
• Collaboration in the cloud will facilitate all this
• This will allow for a multi modal, multi spectral, multi factor representation of the world/reality.

Understanding the real power of Simulation

• Rise of simulation outside Defense market into other markets. Customers outside defense are starting to understand what Simulation can do for them in instances like climate change and disaster management
• Simulation will morph with metaverse concepts of immersive experiences in digital environments and provide more realistic visualization
• Simulation to help us make better decisions. It will enable us to proactively make decisions on different scenarios before they happen.

AI continues to be a game changer

• More ready-to-use AI functionalities and capabilities will be available for the Geographic Information System (GIS) market
• We will see the very first deep learning models and principles demonstrating basic but initial capacity of AI-based reasoning
• The drive towards AI reasoning principles will be significant. The latest advances on deep learning AI, with large language models, are paving the way to a knew impressive and useful conversational AI. The results are impressive so far but are transitory as they rely much more on large memorization of data/knowledge and rely on predictions versus real reasoning and some results are “incorrect or nonsensical”
• In parallel more progress will be done in AI to tackle generalization from In-data distribution to OOD (Out Of Distribution capabilities)
• Multimodality: consuming different types of 2D and 3D data and fusing them together (imagery, Lidar, video, and text)
• Synthetic data generation with AI. This has been spoke about for several years and now is coming into its own
• One of the big bottlenecks of AI is the strong dependance of manually annotated data. In 2023 we will see more approaches such as self-supervised learning, generative AI, and deep reinforcement learning which will allow a decrease in this dependency to preparing data for AI

In summary, 2023 promises to be a pivotal year for technologies such as 3D, the Metaverse, Simulation and AI.

About the Author
Jean-Michel Brière is PRESAGIS’ President. During the last ten years, Jean-Michel has built the company into a well-recognized brand in the industry by delivering innovative products and technologies to its markets. Most recently, he led PRESAGIS to the release of its first cloud-based product called VELOCITY 5D, which offers an innovating and immersive technology platform for the Geographic Information System (GIS) market.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 5:52 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.