All posts by Richard Thomas
Measuring Change at Scale: FARO’s Mass-Data Vision for Digital Reality
At INTERGEO 2025 in Frankfurt, FARO®, a business of AMETEK®, Inc. wasn’t just celebrating a milestone, it was making a case for how 20 years of terrestrial laser scanning experience feeds directly into the next wave of GIS: mass data, AI-ready point clouds and digital twins that help societies manage infrastructure at scale. “All of...
Vexcel: How a Camera Company Turned Itself into a Global Data Engine
From film scanners to hybrid camera-LiDAR systems and a 43-country data program, Vexcel’s CEO Alexander Wiechert described the journey leading to the current product line in a conversation with xyHt at INTERGEO in Frankfurt. By Richard Thomas, Executive Editor Walking past the Vexcel booth at INTERGEO 2025, you see Merlin, Osprey 4.2, Condor and Dragon 4.2 front...
Oriented Imagery in GIS: Unlocking Value From Unstructured Data
In an era defined by explosive data growth and rapidly expanding drone-based sensing, the geospatial community faces a new frontier: unlocking the value of unstructured imagery. Chad Lopez, a solutions engineer with Esri’s Imagery and Remote Sensing team, is at the forefront of this effort. In a recent interview, Lopez discussed how oriented imagery—raw photos...
The Woodstock of GIS: Inside the Esri UC 2025 Experience
At the San Diego Convention Center in July, thousands of GIS professionals, developers, and geospatial newcomers descended upon the 2025 Esri User Conference, an event one company booth dubbed “the Woodstock of GIS.” It’s an apt comparison: energetic, communal, buzzing with shared ideals and grounded in decades of serious, technical evolution. But unlike Woodstock, the...
xyHt Magazine July/August 2025
Read the July/August 2025 xyHt digital edition. Table of Contents LiDAR for Cattle Farming – Airborne lidar is helping ranchers map rangeland, monitor vegetation and plan water resources. Partnering for Geospatial Impact (Sponsored Content) – NV5 Geospatial’s integrated lidar, imagery and AI approach is driving smarter decisions across industries. Having a Ball Doing Layout -One...