At an industry session held at SPAR3D 2016 in April in The Woodlands, Texas, Steve Hutsell, Chief, Geospatial Section U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Seattle District, and Lou Bush, Director of Survey, Bowman Consulting Group, gave a talk entitled: “Integrated Data Capture, BIM, CIM, GIS and CAD – Owner and Industry Perspectives on Products, Processes and Policies for Informed Decision Making.”
Daryl Madden, senior vice president and general manager, Advanced Information Solutions and Geospatial Solutions at Textron Systems Geospatial Solutions of Sterling, Va. spoke with GISCafe Voice about the $13 million corporation’s commercial off-the-shelf products.
Those I spoke to at SPAR3D 2016 last week were amazed at the progress the 3D laser scanning/reality capture products had made over just one year. Many people attended in order to find out if the technology would be right for their organization and what it would entail in terms of a learning curve, and of course, how much it would cost.
The four morning keynotes kicking off SPAR3D 2016 Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, Tuesday morning included Eddie Paddock, Engineering/VR Technical Discipline lead, NASA Johnson Space Center, Greg Bentley, CEO Bentley Systems, Inc., David Smith, CTO, Wearality, and Curtis Chan, technical evangelist, Autodesk.
Brian Goldin, CEO and founder of Voyager Search and formerly of Esri, recognizes that geospatial systems amass a tremendous amount of data. “A lot of solutions for helping people understand data haven’t evolved very well,” said Goldin. “By taking some modern web search technology and combining it with geospatial data, we can allow someone to install some software for dealing with their data without impacting their work in their existing IT environments.”
At Esri Federal GIS two weeks ago, there were a number of three-hour presentations called “Summits” that focused on particular areas of expertise and featured many federal agency experts.
At Esri FedGIS held in Washington D.C. last week, the second day opened with inspiring plenary speaker, Susan Gordon, deputy director, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA).
CartoConsult created a “before and after” photomontage to help to secure planning permission for a quarry extension in Kent. Working with DB Landscape Consultancy (DBLC) on behalf of site owners Ferns, CartoConsult prepared the high resolution photomontage to show the potential visibility for a sensitive site of the proposed extension to the existing Wrotham Quarry.
ArcGIS Earth from Esri, a free, desktop-based interactive globe that can be used to explore the world, was launched last week. The globe works with various 3D and 2D map data formats including KML, Google’s data format. Among its capabilities are the ability for users to display data on the globe, sketch place marks, measure distances and areas, and add annotations for easy understanding of spatial information.
Top trends that we can expect to see dominating the geospatial landscape in 2016 are trends driven in large part by world events and climate change. Technologies play a large part in how well we will be able to manage climate change and attendant disasters, world events that include terrorism, and disease.