When the days get shorter and winter closes in, many people
feel like hibernating until a prognosticating rodent tells us our fate for the
next six weeks. At Terrametrix we don’t exactly brush off our top hats and
break out the tuxedos but we do come calling. We have personally attended more
than half of the nation’s state surveyor conferences, 16 related conferences
just this season. It is the height of
our marketing efforts networking with surveyors and transportation engineers
throughout the country. It was great to see all the familiar faces at the
conferences as well as make some new contacts. One thing I realize are the
number of people that attend these conferences year after year and it is a
truly amazing group of professionals. Traditionally, this time of year is off-season
for surveyors who use this time for professional development hours and
conferencing because of weather.
Technology is changing all that however. Topographic surveys
can be acquired at the desktop, virtually walking the field through measureable
point cloud data accompanied by geo-reference, time-stamped imagery. Tool sets
that run inside of MicroStation like TerraSolid and TopoDOT easily handle point
cloud data collected by terrestrial mobile LiDAR scan systems like Terrametrix’
s StreetMapper system are extending the season. Software applications provide
versatile and capable tools for anyone who needs to process and utilize 3D
LiDAR data: surveyors, civil engineers, designers, planners.
Springtime is a time of rejuvenation for mother nature and
is my favorite time of year. It means warm days ahead, easier days in the field
and enjoying the great outdoors. We usually mark the start of spring with our
industry SPAR Conference traditionally held in Houston. This year the event
organizers moved the conference to Colorado Springs where not unlike the famous
gopher we were hampered by the continuation of winter. Part of our spring fever was seeing amazing
new technology our industry has to offer. uGRIDD, a web-based service provider
offering geo-referenced infrastructure data offers a platform for public and
private sharing of information. There are time saving tools to retrieve and/or
process data in Map2CAD, Data2KML, and uMeasure which is free. It is worth a
look at http://www.uGRIDD.com. Also, we are starting to see indoor scan
solutions with handheld mobile scanners like DOT Products 3d Handheld
which is long on innovation and short on range and 3DLM’s ZEB1. If you are in the market
for a handheld scanner these two would be a good evaluation beginning.
I have noticed an emergence in acronyms defining our
industry in the recent years. For examples; the New Jersey Surveyors conference
is SURVCON, the Transportation Engineers Association of Missouri is TEAM, and the
Society of American Engineers is SAME. Even spring fever has an abbreviated
form SAD, seasonal affective disorder. Is it possible we have too much creative
downtime in the dead of winter devoted to conference naming conventions? And I
don’t seem to sleep as much in the afternoon anymore now that spring is finally
upon us.
