Welcome to the Q3 2021 Issue of GeoCue Group News!
Hello and welcome to the third quarter, 2021 GeoCue Group News! In our last newsletter I predicted we would be back to in-person training by June. I am very pleased to announce that we achieved this goal and now have had in-person True View training at our new facility both in June and July.
We’ve Moved!
In May of this year, we moved into our new 15,000 ft2 facility in Triana, Alabama (a rural town next to Huntsville). We have about 7 acres of property here surrounded by farm land. This allows us to step out of our high bay manufacturing area and fly. This has been a real improvement to training since we can opportunistically grab weather windows as short as 20 minutes to get in a training flight. We also have very thick vegetation along the south side of our property and distribution wires on the north side, giving us a variety of LIDAR test objects.
True View 3DIS
Our True View systems continue to be leading the industry in the category of UAV LIDAR/Imaging systems. Customers are finding significant added value in the fact that we colorize the LIDAR point cloud with camera RGB data as a rapid initial product. The biggest uptake in new True View sensor sales has been engineering survey firms. I continue to be amazed at the various types of projects in which our sensors are being used and the sheer frequency of flights our customers are performing. Our success in the Department of Transportation area continues to grow with a recent multi-system order from a single DOT. Of course, our hardware R&D team is extremely busy cooking up new systems and features- technology never sleeps!
DJI – True View “Guest” sensor
As part of our Enterprise Distributor relationship with DJI, over the past few months we have taken delivery of two DJI Zenmuse L1 LIDAR systems. This is a gimbal-mounted, 70° field of view LIDAR/camera system that can be flown only on the DJI M300 RTK drone. In my assessment, DJI still has a few bugs to iron out in this system. We will continue to test and, if it meets our requirements for a minimum quality mapping/survey laser scanner, it will join the Zenmuse P1 as a certified True View “Guest” sensor. Being a True View Guest sensor means we fully support post-processing of the guest sensor in our True View EVO workflows.
LP360/EVO Software
Of course, we are constantly adding new (and useful!) features to our LP360/EVO software. One of our recent additions has been support of “Extra Bytes” in LAS files. These Extra Bytes allow manufacturers to add additional information to point cloud data fields that are useful in processing or visualization. For example, this feature is used by Riegl to add attributes such as Reflectance and Pulse Shape Deviation. You’ll be pleased to discover that EVO/LP360 fully supports these data for both visualization and point data “filtering.”
Enterprise Data
On the Enterprise Data side of our business, I am pleased to announce that Teledyne Technologies has extended our contract as the data processing, storage and dissemination contractor for their Multi-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) project. As you may recall, this is a gimbaled hyperspectral camera mounted on the International Space Station. GeoCue developed the original data processing system as a 100% Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted system during the development phases several years ago. We are now the Operations and Maintenance (O&M) contractor for the data pipeline portions of the system. This has really taught us a lot about managing distributed image data “at scale” in a domain (imagery) with which we are intimately familiar.
Terrasolid
As the North American sales and support center for Terrasolid, we are seeing a big uptick in the use of the new Spatix-hosted version of TerraScan, TerraModeler, TerraPhoto and TerraMatch. Recall that Spatix is an alternative to using Bentley’s MicroStation as the hosting platform for Terrasolid tools. This can really lower the training curve for organizations who are not MicroStation users. Since it is bundled with all versions of Terrasolid tools at no additional cost, it also lowers the cost of adding new seats (again, if you are not already an enterprise MicroStation user).
In spite of the Delta variant of COVID, the world is opening back up. We have already attended two in-person conferences and are scheduled to attend at least one per month for most of the remainder of the year. While the traveling is weary, it is really great to see old friends in person once again. Zoom is never going to come close to providing the value of a face to face meeting!
As always, we very much appreciate those of you who are our customers. Rest assured that we are working hard every day to keep you productive and satisfied!