One objection we frequently encounter when selling our scanning service is that people are afraid of using raw point clouds. We get it. They’re huge data sets often containing 10 GB of data or more. That can be daunting and requires harddrive space and processing power.
Another concern many people have is that they just don’t want to rotate a point cloud in 3D. Usually this is fear is based on not having the 3D navigating motor skills that we scanning experts have. A very valid concern.
So should you succumb to your fears and stay 2D and static forever? No WAY!
Figure 1: Large Point Cloud in AutoCAD
One response to folks that don’t want to use the raw point data is “No problem, we will work with the point clouds and deliver a CAD model to you.” But then, how can our customers really take advantage of the rich information, the extra details that scanning delivers, if they don’t use the point cloud?
Our solution is to offer an easy to use scan-deliverable made by Leica Geosystems called TruView Global. Much like Google Street View, TruView Global opens scan bubble views from the cloud in any browser and on nearly any smart device. This means project stakeholders can virtually visit the project site from their iPhone, take measurements, mark up the image with comments, and hyperlink to other digital documents and websites.
Figure 2: TruView Global from full color scan.
In addition to the cloud version of TruView, we deliver a version that can be loaded on local computers or local servers and viewed using Internet Explorer.
Figure 3: TruView on a local computer, not on the cloud.
The “desktop” or “local” version of TruView is nice but TruView Global has overcome some hurdles of the local version by putting it on the cloud and making it usable in any browser on most devices. This makes collaboration with TruView a much easier task, and honestly pretty cool, and fun.
Please take a look at some of our public TruView Global sites on our portal here.
Contact Ryan Darling for more information rdarling@dwplive.com and take a look at other projects here.
