Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”
Bristol, UK, Earth observation company 4 Earth Intelligence has created a UK street level map of ‘at risk’ areas to help plan for and manage the effects of extreme hot weather conditions using satellites. Their Heat Hazard Postcode data is being made available free at the point of use to national organizations and multi-agency partnerships, such as Local Resilience Forums, that are currently battling the coronavirus pandemic. Created with support from the Ordnance Survey through their Covid-19 Response licensing, the data is expected to be helpful in determining geographic areas experiencing extreme heat this summer.
MGISS, a Liverpool, UK geospatial specialist, released a new version of its web app TopoGrafi that allows for the display of 3D data in real world models. With enhanced 3D data processing capabilities, TopoGrafi is an end to end platform for capturing buried asset data and processing it for visually revealing and interactive Augmented Reality visualizations. Specifically aimed at the utility and infrastructure sectors, TopoGrafi is already helping organizations in water and highways sectors enhance asset location data, improve on-site safety and reduce construction and maintenance costs.
Esri StoryMaps have often been front and center in creating social change. Since the last week of January, Esri’s Cooper Thomas and Ross Donihue have been working on their Esri Covid-19 StoryMaps.
Johns Hopkins University map to capture all confirmed COVID-19 cases, fatalities and recoveries.
Christian Steimle, Bartolomeo Business and Service Manager, spoke with GISCafe Voice about the Airbus built Bartolomeo platform that was successfully launched on March 6th from Cape Canaveral, Florida, US. Bartolomeo is now on its journey to the International Space Station (ISS) and will be installed outside of the Columbus Laboratory, the European module of the ISS built by Airbus.
Pointfuse, a powerful modeling engine that delivers an automatic, precise and flexible way of converting the vast point cloud datasets generated by laser scanners or photogrammetry into segmented mesh models, has launched a new toolkit called Space Creator. Pointfuse Space Creator is designed to facilitate adopting laser scanning within space management, planning and utilization workflows.
Pascal Strupler, Product Manager, HxDR, Hexagon Geosystems spoke with GISCafe Voice about its recent product announcement, HxDR. HxDR is aiming to be Hexagon’s central smart digital reality data hub, a new cloud-based digital reality visualization platform that can import and visualize any type of reality capture data from airborne, ground, and mobile sensors. This data can be integrated together easily, according to Strupler.
In 2019, it came to my attention that there was more specific attention being paid to AEC and GIS integration, specifically two partnerships of AEC companies formed with Esri. In a conversation with Esri’s Kathleen Kewley, GISCafe Voice discussed the resurgence of interest of GIS in the AEC space from an Esri perspective. Kewley also worked at Autodesk at one time. In addition I have included information from a webinar conducted by Autodesk senior technical marketing manager Wes Newman and AEC Solutions engineer from Esri, Rafael Fernandes, about the partnership between Esri and Autodesk.
This is our final installment of Industry Predictions for 2020. Topics this week include satellites, Cloud for geospatial applications, data storage, data sentience, data sovereignty, growth, location, mapping fleets and much more.
Representatives from CubeWerx, DataCapable, T-mapy, GeoSapient, Inc. and Mapillary offer their insights into the industry and trends for the future.
GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 move forward into February. Topics covered this week are cloud-based asset management systems, artificial intelligence, smart cities, citizen science, open source mapping and data, GNSS advancements, big spatial data analytics, drone industry, enterprise scale and dashboards and data visualizations.