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Will lidar remain the go-to method for pro-grade 3D models? Or will the iPhone eat its lunch? What will the next five years look like for 3D capture? NavVis senior customer success manager Noah Eckhous weighs in -- and the answers may surprise you.
Creators & Guests
What is The Spatial Reality Podcast?
We host one on one interviews exploring the businesses and individuals that are defining the applications of spatial computing. We aim to show you how spatial computing can change your business and your life—not a decade from now, not in a few years, but today.
Sean: Welcome to the Spatial Reality Podcast, your resource for authentic conversations about spatial computing technologies. I'm Sean Higgins, your host. Every few weeks I'll interview an expert to learn how this technology is changing a huge variety of fields and industries, and figure out what we can do to prepare for what's next.
Today's guest is Noah Eckhouse. Senior Customer success manager at NavVis NavVis is a German company best known for its mobile mapping solutions, including the wearable system, NavVis VLX. A quick disclaimer, when I'm not podcasting, I freelance writing blogs for 3D tech companies, and you may have seen my name on an educational piece or two over at the NavVis website.
But this podcast is editorially independent, and today our goal isn't to sell you anything. We'll be discussing the development of 3D Tech since Noah got into the game about a decade ago, and learn how new tools and technologies are making 3D capture better, faster, cheaper, and easier for anyone to use.
With that out of the way, let's get down to it. So first of all, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. We look forward to talking about the development. Mobile mapping over time with you, or just 3D scanning in general. But before we get to that, I want to ask the question I ask at the beginning of every podcast, which is, what does the term spatial computing mean to you?
Is that a meaningful term? Is it one of those useless business terms? Is it all hype? What
Noah: do you think about it? So first off, thank you for having me. My pleasure Being here. I would say that to me, spatial computing actually is totally hype. The two words together, I had to look them up to actually find out what it is exactly that you were looking for.
Uhhuh. , and I did. I thought, this is what I've been studying for the last 12, 13 years. This is GIS. When I looked into what spatial computing is, it's essentially, here are all of these things with a spatial component that's essentially gis. This is just a fancy new umbrella term for it. Yeah, and it does include a few other things like augmented reality, virtual reality, but ultimately in the end, it's all positioning based and that's where it does tie back into GIS.
Sean: The way people tend to think about it is more on a micro scale or a local scale, whereas traditionally we've tended to think of GIS as being on a much larger scale. Do you, would you at least say that there's been a development in our thinking about positioning as we move into calling it spatial computing as opposed to gis?
Noah: I think that there definitely is a change in the way that people are thinking about a spatial component. It's not just at the scale of a building or a city or some phenomena at that scale. So I think that that's probably one of the biggest differences is that people are now thinking of, I've got a VR headset and it knows where I am in my room.
How does it do that? And so that's where the definition starts to become separated out, at least how I've seen it. However, what I would say, , you're not giving enough credit to GIS because you could use GIS at any scale. I've even come up with ways to use it at scales where you're looking at individual plants within a plot.
Hmm.
Sean: As we get on to talking about. Handheld or person powered mobile mapping systems. I would love it if we could start this out by maybe you tell me a bit about what you do within NavVis, what NavVis does. Obviously we're not trying to sell a product to anybody, but just give an idea of where you're coming from and what sort of work you're involved with at the moment.
Noah: I'm a senior customer success manager over at NavVis newly, also at the Global Demo Experience Lead. So I've been thinking a lot about product but also. Not the salesman for it, which is nice. But yeah. So what I've done here at NavVis over the past, approximately, you. Just five days ago was my two year anniversary at NavVis congrat.
What I've done. Yeah, so what I've done here over the last two years has primarily been to enable people at that early stage when it's pre-sales, to thoroughly vet the product, evaluate it, make sure that it does fit their needs. achieves those things that we say that it can, and then once they do purchase, then I've spent all of my time with that onboarding customer success phase where I'm there to make sure that they understand workflows, they understand how things fit together, and make sure that they are getting the most out of it, again, per what we say is possible.
Sean: you've been in a position to see how newcomers to 3D capture technology, different sorts of customers in different industries, how people are reacting to this sort of development of it in real time. Obviously, something like a mobile mapping system is, I don't wanna say at the forefront of the development of this technology, but it's certainly a new thing and it's bringing, bringing spatial capture to places where it's never been before.
I suppose I wanna start by asking, what did the 3D capture industry look like when you started doing this work? How were people reacting to the technology?
Noah: When we start to take steps back from what we're looking at right now, one of those really common. Precursors to lidar capture. It was photogrammetry, so people, lots of overlapping images and being able to derive structure from them.
And so when I actually started in reality capture, I think this was back in 2012 or 13, I was in a research lab where I did my undergrad and we actually had a. and a point and shoot camera and a mechanical gimbal. And we were using very cheap handheld GPS unit and we were dwelling on each of our points for at least an hour or two to try to make sure that we got okay observations for ground control.
But at that point in time, even though we were a decently well funded research lab, where drones still felt a little bit out of reach at the time, Phantom, you know, DJ Phantom, that essentially became ubiquitous. That was something that we didn't get in that research lab until another year or so after that point, and all of those software necessary for planning flights, it wasn't quite there yet.
So when I started with this, My first exposure was actually with satellite imagery and airborne imagery creating photogrammetric models from like buildings, like building scale objects. But as we got into the kites and then we went into things like drones, then handheld lidar, it has changed quite a bit, of course, but those same principles are just as valid.
When I first picked up the kite as to when I pick up a VLX today, At
Sean: that point, even if you were relatively well-funded research facility, you may not have had access to the sorts of tools that would make it pretty straightforward or quick to capture. I believe I know the answer to this question, but would you say that's changed in the past decade?
Noah: Yeah, definitely. . Even if you don't have a LIDAR chip in your iPhone, you can still go out and do photogrammetry and there's apps that'll guide you through it, not even to get into Nerf, which of course now there's apps that will guide you through that. That as well the difference between the amount of prep work and just basic knowledge that you had to have to achieve something that was, would consider pretty decent then versus going out now and try to achieve something of similar or better.
it has gotten so much easier and so much more accessible.
Sean: So would you say it was already more accessible by the time you started working in the field of mobile mapping a few years ago and you were talking to these companies who are maybe looking to get into mobile mapping from terrestrial scanning?
Was it already accessible at
Noah: that point, do you believe? Yeah. Let's take a step back to when I first started. Mobile or handheld lidar, I would go into an organization and they may be using terrestrial scanning or maybe they were just using a distometer and an iPad or a notebook to actually to do their sketching.
And so at that point in time, there was still millions of square feet being done that way. Obviously not quite as accurate, not quite as quickly as they can do it today, but they were going out capturing spaces like so, and then we were going in and showing. Hey, in about 10 minutes, rather than two or three days, we could probably capture that same space.
And so at that point in time, the technology, it was still pretty fresh as far as people's, uh, levels of acceptance of SLAM scanning went. Mm-hmm. . And so there was a lot of just trying to break down those barriers, those preconceived notions. And there was a few companies that really helped us push that forward, sell a lot of units.
And at the time though, They were still fairly pioneering. So while we might consider this to be a relatively well developed product, they were still taking a risk by going out and performing SLAM scanning primarily.
Sean: Just for the people who aren't as well steeped in this as maybe you are or I am, could you maybe give a quick overview of what exactly SLAM does for people what mobile mapping is in this context, and then maybe even what kind of applications it might be particularly well suited for.
Noah: Yeah, and so SLAM basically you could considered a computer science problem of if I don't know where I am, I don't know what en my environment looks like. I also don't know where I am within the environment, the basics of it.
And so if you guys have a Roomba or some sort of robot vacuum at home, it's going to very slowly and methodically plot out a map of your home, one collision at a time. SLAM scanners are doing pretty much the same thing. In the case of the NavVis VLX, it's 600,000 times a second, but all these scanners are putting out thousands of points a second in order to make a snapshot of the environment that you're in.
And then comparing those snapshots over time enables you to figure out where you are within that space and what it looks like from any angle, and so the reason that it was develop, It has so many important uses is that it enables you to map in GPS denied environments. It also enables you to map very complex environments.
So traditionally people would be going in and either using some sort of vehicle mounted system with a GNSS receiver on it. That's essentially the umbrella term for gps cuz there's a few other constellations in there. Maybe you're using GNSS per position, but what happens if you don't have access to.
You need some other way in order to relate all of your data together. And so that's where having this continuous snapshot enables us to rapidly create accurate maps. So common use cases in indoor buildings. This is really any indoor spaces where. You're going to see the biggest time savings as compared to traditional methods.
Um, however, anywhere that you need rapid capture, if you need to get in, get out, this coverage is important so you don't have to return to the site. Things like busy environments in healthcare, manufacturing, construction, just to name a few.
Sean: One of the, one of the fascinating things about this technology to me is if you look at the early examples of LIDAR scanning, um, I remember somebody once joking that you needed a whole IT department in a van in order to do it.
Now it seems like the level of technical infrastructure that you need has been reduced. Has that changed over time
Noah: as well? If we just think about how, if we look at the laptop that I travel with today versus the laptop that I started traveling with when I started working in the. The sales side of spatial.
Um, yeah, but we've shaved about four or five pounds off of that laptop, maybe at least an inch of thickness overall. I think that alone is a good indicator of the sort of horsepower that I used to have to bring around with me just to process relatively short, low density scans just to bring them together so I can show them to the end customer.
You're, you know, Get to upload things to the cloud. Don't have to worry about having a workstation in my backpack. And on that front alone, I would say there's been a massive difference as far as working with the point clouds as well, I would say. So to that end, you need your IT part department in the van to make sure that the thing works.
And then you need your engineers and you need actual academics to actually interpret the data and work with it on the back. Now the data's getting so good that it doesn't require an expert to identify an object within there. And to go so far as to say there's a lot of AI powered tools that are doing auto segmentation, classification of point clouds, things that we would've thought important people work relatively.
Mm-hmm. recently, I've been seeing some really awesome gains. To be honest, it's not the sort of work that anybody really wants to do. So the more AI and point cloud segmentation classification, the better, in my opinion.
Sean: What was it like two years ago when you started talking to potential customers? What were they concerned about?
Were they as educated as they are now? How was that? And then how would you compare that to your experience today talking to potential
Noah: customers? I would say that education has gone up as SLAM scanners, mobile scanners have a longer time in the market. Obviously we get more exposure. But we're also proving ourselves every day, and it does still feel like we are in that transition time where we're going through the early adopters into more of those pragmatists, but what we're finding is that more and more people are pragmatists overall.
Out of those conversations we're having today, we're generally fairly conservative, are having an easier. Biting the bullet because they've seen five, 10 projects being done successfully with this technology. Maybe they're losing bids to it, or maybe they're just not quite coming under budget the way that they may be.
It may be possible with it, with an alternative. So I would say that when I started with NavVis two years ago, had worked for a previous distributor, and so I was selling Trimble gear primarily. Mm-hmm. and it's very established. Everybody knows it. In fact, a lot of people are required to use it. It's a very, very different value proposition than coming in and talking about the NavVis VLX, for example.
And so two years ago we were still talking about relative accuracy, absolute accuracy, and it actually took a little bit finesse to effectively explain accuracy. It wasn't just, here's a number and you can actually trust that over this sort of project size. Come a year past that, we'd introduced a new white paper, a new product, and so we, it's been getting easier and easier overall just because I think there's awareness and trust that's being built in the industry as far as what can we do with mobile mapping.
People are finding really it's niches and also pushing the boundaries, and that's where I'd say people in the community pushing its boundaries, talking to other people in the capture community, that's the best thing possible for us because that's what leads to more new types of business than anything else.
A surveyor of ours may go out and do some things that if NavVis were to say, Hey, we did this, we'd probably get a lot of flack for it in the industry, but it's a customer of our going out and saying, Hey, check out the data that I'm capturing that had a lot of a better reception. So yeah, I would say that our customers are one of the bigger parts of how it's making, how it's been easier in this two years because they're doing a great job of educating their customers and the community overall.
Sean: Yeah. Having seen the development of this so quickly, to the point where these tools are less expensive than they were in the past, they're slightly easier to use. The data's. , where do you see professional grade capture technology? Let's say something like within the realm of VLX where do you see that being in five years or 10 years or 20 years from now?
We've seen the trajectory over the past decade or so. I've also been in the industry for about that long. What's the next decade
Noah: look like? I think something that we're seeing. People are really curious about all of these really small LIDAR sensors, so low power, low footprint, things like what you might get at an iPhone, solid state stuff, but there's just so much exciting development around LIDAR sensors themselves that I'm really curious to see where LIDAR goes in the next five, 10 years.
But there's also a very real possibility that LIDAR is not the most, most common reality capture. once again. Cause of course in the fifties they're flying a stereo. Photogrammetric flights. They've got cameras. They're gonna set up these weird little glasses over to images of a map and so that you can actually see the elevation and you're tricking your eyes via parallax.
We are probably just headed back to that at some point now. I think there's always gonna be a place for lidar because it provides that instant depth mapping with less computing necessary. However, it's a really interesting. I could see NeRF or something like it becoming a valuable part of the process.
Overall, I think what we're gonna see as probably more accurate, more area in less time and more compact. And so I think that's really the goal is that LIDAR sensors right now are big, heavy, a little bit power hungry, and so as we get advances in technology on that front, it's going to open up a whole new world of what sort of capture is.
Would you say
Sean: that is, that's the push in the future to make it more widely available, like people have reached a specific level of quality and speed with professional tools and maybe. The remaining frontier to push on is to make them smaller, more affordable, easier to use, and so on.
Noah: Yeah, definitely. I think if you, as we look at spatial computing in the future of that, what it really means is everything is gonna be spatially enabled.
So internet of Things sort of sensors are one, one side of that, but you need a framework in which to put that. So you need space. Now, this is. The sort of the driving down the cost and driving, driving down barriers to access are so important because there is more interior space than professionals would be able to capture in years.
If you said start today, they'd barely get through my block before a year is up. If we're talking about my neighborhood alone, how much of that has been digitized. But as we look at different types of capture methods, maybe there's a 360 photo tour of that property. Maybe there's a lidar flight from above done at the county scale, and so there's all this data out there.
It's at different scales, spatially, temporally, radiometrically, spectral. It's all different. How do we relate that to each other? We need to drive the cost of capture down so there's almost no barrier to capture so that everything gets captured in some way. So I think it's super important for the future.
Do you
Sean: think that the line between what we think of as consumer 3D capture technology and professional 3D technology will erode over time from either side, say as they put Sony LIDAR sensors into the iPhone and that improves, or as a company like NavVis pushes to bring the cost of their capture devices down, is it gonna become more of a continuum?
Cuz right now it seems like there's a very clear division between
Noah: the two. I would say it's already starting to blur and I think that Matterport did a good job of starting to blur those lines because pretty much everything they make is effectively prosumer, where ease of operation is there and level of quality of capture is gonna be generally pretty consistent across operators.
As long as you follow. Some basics. And with the VLX too, in a lot of environments, pretty much anyone can capture pretty much the same data. Now we're talking about that, that last 10, 20%, that takes the extra effort. That's where having an expertise is really valuable. But as far as the tools themselves go, I would save that as the cost comes down, you get people who are more pioneering or enterprising and they say, you know what?
I see a niche here. and so maybe they're going out and they're buying a VLX today to do some things that people are not using a VLX for as of yesterday, but now there's somebody using a VLX for that today. If we look at just the scanning of hopes, the amount of capture that's going on in small scale residential, I think that it's pretty evident that we've got tons and tons of people out there doing capture, selling it as a service and maybe not having any idea what a lot of the underlying technology is doing, but rather it's been packaged well enough, they can go out and capture it and sell that without having to understand more than, here's your best practices.
If it looks good, it is
Sean: good. So for those of us who have been following this technology for a while, I think there's a tendency to think of it as, I don't wanna say late in the game, but far along the path of development. But talking to you, it seems clear that we're, it's, we're potentially right at the beginning of, of a sea change, something big happening in terms of broader accessibility to this technology and higher quality and different kinds of people using these for new kinds of applications.
It seems like it's really opening up to people in a way. Has not been possible for a really, maybe even since the very first LiDAR scanner.
Noah: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I was training this guy an absolute pro and veteran in the capture industry at his company, and we're at lunch just, you know, talking shop and he pulls out his phone and he starts showing me photogrammetric models that he's developed just using photos from his phone using an app, and I gotta.
Yes, his background was helpful there, but they were really good models and it was literally just walking around with the phone with a little bit of guidance from an app, a little bit of guidance from his experience and knowledge. But overall, I think we are seeing, seeing it change for sure. And especially because people said early on it was expensive to scan, and so not many people started scanning projects unless there was a very specific need.
Now, you'll hear people in the industry say, it's too expensive not to scan because of the potential for what errors you might catch. If you catch it today or the day after it happens, how much is it gonna cost before everything is sealed in? three months later. So things like that where I think it's just gonna become ubiquitous on any scale project.
If I, I think, I think we've got a few people at the company who've taken a VLX out and scanned their home pre-remodel, handed that over to an architect and said, here you go. Nice perk. Some of the architects say, I don't know what to do with this and with my iPad and draw. But overall, it's pretty amazing.
Just like if you look at what sort of capture is going on out there, and as far as awareness of a term like lidar goes, just massive increase in awareness in the last two, three years. So this is,
Sean: I wonder a lot of the times when I talk to people about 3D technologies or AR, VR, various visualization technologies, we're talking about things.
people are in the process of developing, but maybe no one has a sense for whether or not it's quite ready for use more broadly. But this is interesting because as you're talking about it, it's, it seems very clear that it is ready for use. So then my question is, knowing that, how would a person who's interested in performing spatial capture for their business for the first time.
how do they get involved with this sort of thing? Or how do they start to do the research to figure out if it's for them, what sort of tool is right for them? How do they jump in in a way that's responsible and so that they're well prepared?
Noah: That's a good question. I believe in reading what's post on the forums.
Finding conversations that are relevant to you maybe on LinkedIn and asking people who have an experience with a wide variety of scanners. I generally say that people are actually pretty open in this industry. There's a certain amount of that's my IP or that's my technique, and maybe they're not gonna give you the specifics, but a lot of people are happy to share a lot of what they know.
And so I would say is if you have somebody that you know in the industry or. If you don't know them directly, but you know of them, reach out. You might be surprised what you can find out just from opening up and asking somebody about their experience with X tool or X type of project. There's a lot of great conferences, so you can always go to a trade show and hear it from each of the individual manufacturers themselves.
We just got back from Geo Week, so it'll be a while before you can get back to that one. Throughout the year, there's smaller regional ones closer to where you. Um, so I would say try to keep an eye out for industry events and then also being on LinkedIn, just doing some general research. There is so much information on SLAM out there that you actually have to specify the drafting about slam scanners when you're looking into research for that specifically.
So I would say once you. Some information, then it's a good time to reach out to some distributors or manufacturers and hear from them, maybe get a product demonstration. Either virtual or in person. And then this is gonna really help you figure out your roi. Well, what sort of accuracy needs do you have?
And once you have a good understanding of those things, that's really where you can start to, to dial in on a product. Because we have this, there's this joke about the right tool for the job, and I'm sure that we'll come back to this one again later, but if you're digging the foundation for a building, What size excavator are you gonna bring?
If your budget says shovel, you're bringing a shovel, right? There's no way around that, even if you'd much, much rather have the excavator. And so that's where understanding your budget, understanding what tools spit into that is super important.
Sean: So I'd love to close this by asking. Looking at the different technologies that have been developed for 3D capture recently, or the different applications that people have used them for, is there anything in particular that you've been impressed by that you've looked at and thought, man, I didn't think anybody would do that, or I didn't think that.
I didn't think that that tool would ever become a thing. I know we've probably talked about a few so far, but is there anything that's surprised you personally as you've been keeping an eye on this industry?
Noah: Honestly, I think the NeRFs and like the rapid photogrammetric processing is one of those things that I find very impressive because I've spent a lot of time matching photos and cleaning them up and then setting your computer to run and coming back after the weekend is over to see what was produced.
Computational effort very high on those things. But the ability to create a model at essentially any scale, because the camera has a resolution that changes as you get closer to an object. So you're not set with a fixed resolution. So the textures that you can generate are incredible. And so where I would say is, um, the work that's going into things like Nerf, is going to be amazing for 3D visualization as far as reality capture goes.
Definitely has a little bit of work to do there, but I'm really excited to see things like more photo-based capture, maybe in combination with lidar cuz they both have their strengths. So I would say, um, I think those sorts of multi-sensor approaches, especially with cheaper consumer grade versions of each sensor.
As each sensor gets better and the software gets better, I think what we're gonna see is an iPhone being able to produce some really nice models soon. If you've seen the density of their models, now you probably, you might be confused by the textures cause they look wonderful. But once we get all of that working together, that's where I feel like Lidar scanners themselves may end up being relatively specialized tools as far as, as far as capture goes now.
So what mobile scanning is doing to terrestrial scanning today? In a few years, we may see the same for more photo based methods doing the same to lidar, but um, we're, we've got a lot, there's a lot, to be honest, there's a long way to go, but it's been a busy five years I would say. So we'll see what the next look like.
Yeah.
Sean: It seems like if you are a business person and you're looking at this technology, , there's maybe, I don't wanna say yesterday was the right time to get involved with it, but certainly today would not be too late or too early. Seems like just the right time as things are working out. It's a bright time to be involved with using 3D capture for your business.
Noah: Definitely would agree with you on that one,
Sean: and that's all for today. Thanks for spending some time with us. If you like what you heard, subscribe wherever you usually get your podcast. Before you go, one quick request. There's a leader in the 3D tech space or a colleague who is doing innovative work and you'd like to have them interviewed on the podcast.
Send me a note on LinkedIn later.