Category Archives: Magazine
Inventing the Workflow: How Phoenix LiDAR Helped Build the Market It Now Serves
When Grayson Omans, founder and CEO of Phoenix LiDAR Systems, described the company’s transition into its next chapter following the Revolution Geosystems acquisition, he did not sound like a man delivering a polished exit line. He sounded like someone who had spent years living inside the pressure of building a company and was finally ready to...
The Right Tool for the Right Layer: How Tetra Tech Rooney Is Rethinking Reality Capture
A Design Technology Manager at one of the nation’s largest engineering and technical services firms explains why a mixed-capture strategy — terrestrial scanner, SLAM, drone, and phone — beats any single technology approach. Tetra Tech is one of the largest engineering and technical services firms in the United States, a publicly traded company with operations...
The Chain That Counts
Four specialists on what actually separates a drone data product from a deliverable a surveyor will stamp The unmanned systems industry has spent a decade getting very good at one thing: flying. The airframes are capable, the sensors are capable, and the regulatory framework, while still evolving, is no longer the primary bottleneck it was...
Teledyne FLIR IIS: The Camera Inside the Stack
When Mike Lee, director of product management for the company’s spherical imaging business, sat down with xyHt at Geo Week 2026, he was not pitching a new workflow platform or a digital twin ecosystem. He was describing a company whose job is to provide a visual sensing layer that other companies’ systems depend on —...
Pix4D’s Platform Moment: From Photogrammetry Engine to Enterprise Reality
Fifteen years into the UAV software revolution, Pix4D’s CTO sees Gaussian splatting, AI-assisted editing, and the smartphone-as-surveying-instrument converging into something bigger than any single tool. When Pix4D was founded in 2011 as a spin-off from EPFL’s Computer Vision Lab in Lausanne, the pitch was essentially this: drones are coming, and someone has to turn the...
The Image as Evidence
Time-stamped, location-aware imagery has quietly crossed a threshold from documentation to trusted record. The geospatial profession is now in the business of producing evidence — and the standards have not caught up to the stakes. A surveyor flying a bridge deck, a GIS technician cataloging post-storm damage, a mapping firm delivering obliques to an insurer:...