GISCafe Voice Industry Predictions 2022 – Part 4

Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, maximizing the value of Digital Twins, higher refresh rate on satellite data, and a new group of users: geospatial immigrants are among this week’s 2022 Industry Predictions. The industry needs to ensure two things for this category of users who don’t care if the data is geospatial or anything about it – firstly that users are getting the right data for their needs, and secondly that they are able to access it easily.

courtesy of Getmapping

Take a look at what these three companies are doing – RoadBotics, Khatib & Alami, and Getmapping to learn more about these exciting new predictions and directions for 2022.

Lisa McCune-Noll is a Cartographer with the Products Team at RoadBotics

RoadBotics

RoadBotics’ AgileMapper immediately transforms your visual infrastructure data into meaningful, interactive maps using artificial intelligence (AI). Our ground level imagery and map data platform lets you create and store your own data, producing accurate, useful maps.

So looking down the road, I see these predictions in the future of GIS technologies in 2022.

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, everyone’s had to pivot and adapt or create new conditions and situations as performance demands.  Adapting infrastructure and adapting what we think of as infrastructure, and improving those components, is critical to supporting people’s needs well into the future.

Repairing old or outdated infrastructure and retrofitting with smart technology is fundamental, but constructing new, expansive infrastructure systems is crucial to future community planning and sustainability. Digital twin technology utilizing AI and machine learning will greatly improve maintenance, and streamline management efficiency.

As we realized in 2021, supply chain management and logistics is at the whim of real world issues such as pandemics, climate change, and canal and port congestion. The GIS industry is poised to jump in with real world solutions, such as for the ‘last mile problem’ in deliveries, combining GIS and BIM, location awareness, and accessibility, reverse logistics from returns and reuse of shipping packaging, and combining Port Management software with GIS.

There will likely be additional focus of GIS technologies on conservation, sustainability, renewable energy siting, climate change, epidemiology, and citizen science, as this becomes more critical to urban, suburban, rural, and wild environments.

Likewise, there will be a further merging of technologies for all uses, with open source mapping & data, expansion of smartphone image/video capture, aerial drones, subsurface robots, action cameras, etc. all coming together to provide imagery and data for platforms to utilize. These then will produce useful interactive maps for many uses in all sectors from government, industry, and municipal, to the general public.

Lisa McCune-Noll is a Cartographer with the Products Team at RoadBotics, with 18 years of experience in the GIS & Photogrammetry industry.

Mohammad Hammoud, Senior Manager, Khatib & Alami

Khatib & Alami

The possibilities which can come from GIS technology and its integration GIS with other technologies are growing all the time, and I’d expect this trend to continue in 2022. The most exciting solutions tend to fit neatly under the “smart city” umbrella – this is an area in which clients are putting increasing focus in their quest to reap the benefits of the vast data available at a city or community level.

The digital twin concept has evolved and improved massively over the last couple of years, and is already on the shopping lists of many clients. In simple terms, a digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world objects, processes, behaviors and relationships, and is used nowadays to represent any city to realize its initiatives and improve the lives of its citizens. GIS has an important role to play in maximizing the value of digital twins, regardless of the setting – from individual buildings to entire cities. A recent K&A project involved creating a reality model of 250 sq km of mixed terrain in Muscat, Oman, integrating ArcGIS and Bentley ContextCapture. We captured 330,000 drone images in 90 days, resulting in outstanding quality and accuracy at reduced costs. This project was among the first of its kind for us, but demand is expected to keep growing this year.

Similarly, the integration of GIS with IoT sensors is enabling clients to track their assets and staff, and to constantly manage their environments. They can therefore respond to issues and threats in a timely way. This data is used to better manage resources, assets and services and improve operations. Additionally, Artificial Intelligence (AI), will enhance this ability even more. Linked to this theme, K&A has been involved in the development of increasing numbers of command and control centers for government clients, and we expect demand to strengthen in 2022.

The construction sector tends to be slow to adopt new technologies, but I’m excited by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) to transform the way people work on sites. AR provides a user-friendly means of zooming in and out while looking at BIM and GIS models, making it really easy to observe any mismatches between model and reality. I expect to see increasing use of AR applications, allied with GIS and BIM, for activities such as Project Status tracking, on-site construction documents, on-site clash reviews and “platform as a vision”, whereby all BIM and GIS data will be integrated into an open AR platform. This will enable the visualization of hidden infrastructure, as well as speeding up the availability of information to those who need it on site, improving collaboration and reducing the potential for mistakes.

I expect 2022 to be an exciting year for the sector. Importantly, client organizations are more aware than ever of the benefits which emerging solutions can deliver, and are therefore more keen to invest. We’ve seen the momentum grow over the past few years, and now things are really moving at pace.

Mohammad Hammoud, Senior Manager, Khatib & Alami is an experienced engineer with around 15 years of consulting, technology selling, and technical advising expertise. He has a broad engineering capability and knowledge of a wide range of operational systems, as well as business development experience.

Mohammad is particularly interested in software application, location based services, Cloud and smart city solutions, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to drive innovation inside commercial and governmental entities. In his role as K&A, he has proved to be successful in building valuable business relationships through his technical knowhow, combined with exceptional customer engagement and strong communication skills.

Through his experience with multinational companies, Mohammad has worked with teams across Europe, the Middle East and South Africa.

He is passionate about giving back to the community – he volunteers in several NGOs and supports students with innovation and entrepreneurship graduate programs.

Dave Horner is Group CEO, Getmapping

Getmapping

Our predictions for the top five geospatial industry trends for 2022:

1. The rise of 3D: well in truth not so much a rise – 3d data has been around since the turn of the century in various forms – but the year in which 3D finally comes to the party and becomes established as a viable and valuable solution in its own right.

Whilst 3D data and fly-throughs have long caught the eye at trade shows and exhibitions, generally when you dug under the surface, the use cases for the data tended to be pretty thin on the ground.

However, with the development of 3d software and virtual/augmented reality technology, 3D data is now becoming much more easily accessible to users. The technology and cost barriers that once marginalised 3D data as an expensive “nice to have” add on are rapidly disappearing, and 3D data is now finally becoming accessible to the masses at a price that delivers value to end users.

2. Currency: when Getmapping started creating the first national aerial imagery dataset of Great Britain in 1999, it worked to a five-year update strategy. Ten years later, we were maintaining many areas to three years, and today even that is not enough.

So expect to see the currency of data increasing rapidly, with major towns and cities being maintained on a one year refresh or better. In fact, many areas are already ahead of the UK on that curve – in South Africa for example, many of the metros have been updating their imagery and LiDAR data annually for a number of years, and in Australia, many of the urban areas are captured up to four times a year (of course they have the weather for it..).

Satellite providers will rightly point out that they capture the planet on an even higher refresh rate – sometimes every day – so I would add a qualifier on the currency front around affordability to the mass market. To date, currency has come at a significant cost premium, but that model is changing rapidly.

3. Resolution: In the same way that Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, then the equivalent in the geospatial world is that survey technology doubles its capture rate roughly every five years, and no doubt even that will reduce in years to come.

What that means for the customer is that the currency of the data (as described above) AND the resolution at which it is captured is increasing every year. Taking the Getmapping example, the first survey of Great Britain was carried out at 25cm resolution (to be fair, we were still using film back then). By 2005, digital camera technology enabled data to be captured at higher resolution, and our national imagery layer gradually moved to 12.5cm, with increasing requests for 5cm imagery for towns and cities.

Today, 5cm imagery for urban areas is pretty much the standard, but higher resolution is around the corner – thanks to the latest technology, we started capturing areas at 3cm resolution in 2021.

Drone suppliers will rightly point out here that they can capture down to sub-centimetre. However, it is important to recognise a distinction here between large area capture (towns and cities) and project capture (for example a new development our roundabout). Drones can and do deliver even higher resolution for small areas, but are not yet the right solution for anything larger.

It is also important to recognise the rise in demand for mobile mapping imagery and point cloud data – capturing our communication routes at ultra-high resolution (imagery captured at 3mm resolution 10m from the sensor, with ~1 million points per metre LiDAR data). This is creating an unparalleled level of detail and opening up a range of new applications, many delivered in tandem with the power of AI.

4. Digital Twins: The concept of digital twins first came to prominence in product development and the manufacturing sector, but over the last eighteen months, the concept of creating digital twins of the built environment is being discussed and promoted as an offering more widely.

In truth, anything from a 2D digital map to a full 3d immersive model can be classed as a digital twin, but over the next eighteen months expect to see more and more detailed digital twins of our town and cities coming onto the market in various forms.

The real power of a digital twin is its ability to enable scenario modelling in a safe environment – undertake a wide range of “what if” investigations quickly with minimum disruption in the real world. This also extends to the ability to be there without being there – to undertake site visits from the desktop.

Another powerful spin-off from the rise of digital twins will be the development of experiential solutions – everything from tourism to education to gaming – bringing the built environment straight into our homes.

5. Solutions not data: one of the key benefits to the geospatial industry of the technology revolution is that it is attracting a much wider range of users and creating powerful new applications for data.

However, this does mean that there is now a new generation of what we are starting to call “geospatial immigrants”. In the same way that a digital immigrant is someone who was typically born before or at the start of the digital age, and has had to adapt to the development of digital technology, so are the new entrants to the geospatial industry having to learn to work with geospatial data as a key technology enabler. So whilst traditional users of geospatial data have been more akin to “geospatial natives” – they know what they want and how to use it – the rise of the geospatial immigrant creates a new challenge for the industry.

Geospatial immigrants are generally not that interested in how geospatial data is created and what it is, they are far more interested in what it can do for them. To enable this, the industry needs to ensure two things – firstly that users are getting the right data for their needs, and secondly that they are able to access it easily. This in turn translates into delivering solutions to this new class of customer rather than just delivering data. Giving the client what they need in a way that is easy for them to ingest, analyse and action – i.e. the solution to their problem or challenge.

Dave Horner is Group CEO and heads up the Getmapping Group and is focused on building sustainable growth through long term strategic partnerships that deliver value to our clients, our partners and our supply chain globally.

He has worked in the geomatics industry for over twenty five years and has a wealth of practical experience, having worked as a technical specialist, before stepping up into various management positions and becoming the Group CEO 10 years ago.  He has seen at first hand the huge change of focus in the sector from being a niche industry to becoming recognised as a key enabler across most market sectors.

Tags: air pollution, ArcGIS, broadband, climate change, cloud, crowdsourcing, data, geospatial, GIS, GNSS, health, hurricanes, imagery, indoor mapping, Infrastructure, intelligence, laser scanner, LiDAR, location, maps, mobile mapping, reality modeling, remote sensing, satellite imagery, situational intelligence

Categories: 3D Cities, agriculture, aircraft tracking, airports, analytics, ArcGIS, asset management, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Big Data, Building Information Modeling, climate change, cloud, data, developers, disaster relief, drones, emergency response, Esri, field GIS, flight paths, geospatial, GIS, global aircraft surveillance, government, GPS, image-delivery software, integrated GIS solutions, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, mobile, photogrammetry, remote sensing, resilient cities, satellite based tracking, satellite imagery, sensors, spatial data, survey, transportation

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2022 at 12:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.