AerialSphere Offers 360-Degree Aerial Panoramic Imagery at Higher Elevation and More 

GISCafe CEO Sanjay Gangal recently interviewed Suzi Shoemaker, President and Chief Operating Officer at AerialSphere and owner of a Australian Shepherd/heeler mix, about AerialSphere, a 360-degree aerial panoramic imagery provider.

Sanjay: Suzi, tell us about AerialSphere.

SS: AerialSphere is a 360-degree aerial panoramic imagery provider, which includes geolocated information within every pixel of the image, giving the viewer the opportunity to overlay any type of data that has location information included.

SG: Okay, and how did AerialSphere get started?

SS: AerialSphere got started when two aerial photographers and entrepreneurs, one of those aerial photographers was an inventor, were introduced to each other right about the time Google Street View became popular. One of the entrepreneurs took a look at that and said, “Hey, I’ve done some drone work with some 360-cameras, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this with aerial imagery and be able to provide a mass capture imagery over major metropolitan areas, so that you could utilize the imagery to be able to do something very similar, but from a different perspective?”

SG: And what makes AerialSphere’s offerings unique?

SS: We’re the only ones that are flying at the elevation we’re flying, between 1500 and 2500 feet above ground level. We mass capture an area and then we bring it back into our offices where we have the patented software that allows the pixels to be geolocated with all of the latitude, longitude, and altitude information so that each pixel in the image has that information in it, so when you do overlay data, point data, polylines, any kind of GIS data into the imagery, it aligns perfectly with the image itself.

SG: And how can GIS users use your product?

SS: Right now we have a partnership with Esri and anybody that is an Esri user has the opportunity to subscribe to AerialSphere as an oriented imagery catalog. Oriented imagery catalogs can then be used in Experience Builder or Web App Builder to bring in oriented imagery to any type of project that they’re working on, where they’re looking to have panoramic imagery as part of the project.

SG: What is oriented imagery?

SS: That’s a great question. Oriented imagery is actually something that’s fairly new to Esri. It is any type of image that is not a straight down nadir version of an image, which is what we’re most familiar with. Satellite images that we get that you see on Google Maps generally look straight down. There is also the ability to look at images in oblique angles which are about 30 to 45 degrees but they’re still images. So oriented imagery is all of the stuff in between; it’s the pictures you take off of your camera that are geolocated and have information in and just have a lot of data that you’re interested in maybe showcasing, or it’s videos that are captured and have latitude, longitude information in them, or it’s panoramic imagery like ours that has not just straight down nadir, but also the ability to pan around and look at things from multiple perspectives.

SG: Who can utilize your imagery?

SS: Our imagery can be utilized in any type of project where somebody wants to visualize data. They can be utilized in real estate, commercial real estates, residential real estates, economic debt projects. It could also be utilized for things like planning, development, or even asset management, so looking at how to analyze an area for an installation or transportation corridors, or maybe even following something like the border wall and being able to assess whether or not there’s an environmental impact as a result of that wall being where it is, or whether or not there is a part that’s broken. So there are multitudes of ways the imagery can be used.

SG: Is AerialSphere VC funded or are you running on your own?

SS: It is privately funded at the moment. We did a Series A capital raise in 2019, which is when AerialSphere went from being a start-up with just contractors that are all working together to prove out a concept to a company with employees and growing product, that’s when we did the initial hiring, that’s when we established our company assets, that’s when we finally got our real office, and also when we started doing our mass capture of the United States. AerialSphere has captured 75 most populated urban areas in the United States. We started that process in 2020, we finished it early 2021, and we have begun to recapture or refly those areas that were the earliest captures in 2020, so that our data continually is updated and reflown.

SG: Do you do any major collection outside USA as well?

SS: We have not gone outside the U.S. borders at this point, we’re still in the 48 contiguous United States. We haven’t gone to Hawaii or Alaska either. That is something that we would like to see happen in the future with the growth of our company is to be able to offer imagery also in Mexico and Canada, and then perhaps even on into Europe and the rest of the world. That would be a fantastic thing for us to see happen is grow to where we’re a global offering.

SG: And how many people do you have now?

SS: Right now we have around 20 full-time employees, full-time staff, but we have quite a number of contractors that do a variety of things for us. Some of them are software contractors that are doing very specific projects, some of them are imagery processors that are doing the work on our images when they come in, once they’re ready to be put through our software. So all in all probably around 35 people that are working consistently with the company.

SG: And are your customers primarily U.S. state and local governments or federal government or more private?

SS: We have a mix of both. We have done a lot of projects with commercial real estate and with state local governments, and some events projects. The Waste Management Phoenix Open has been a project that we’ve done in the past. We did a lot of custom work where we would do very specific projects, and we’ve shifted with our Esri partnered partnership to be able to do a lot of the similar type of projects as our early custom work. But it’s done now through the Esri platform and it allows the customer to have a whole lot more autonomy in making edits and changes to a project once it gets started. So it’s really exciting for us to see a lot of what we had done early on become very automated and very available to more customers in a much richer environment.

SG: What is the best way for our audience to find out more about AerialSphere on the internet?

SS: AerialSphere has a beautiful website www.aerialsphere.com. We are also available for information specific to GIS in the Esri marketplace. We have a listing in the Esri marketplace that includes sample data, so somebody that is interested in doing a project and wants to learn more about oriented imagery. We do have our 2019 Phoenix data set of almost 2000 images available in the marketplace as a public group that anybody is welcome to join. And then of course, reaching out directly to us at info@aerialsphere.com.

Tags: cloud, data, ESRI, geospatial, GIS, imagery, satellite imagery

Categories: data, Esri, geocoding, geospatial, GIS, image-delivery software

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2022 at 9:49 am. 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.