Category Archives: Magazine
Esri User Conference 2026: What the Sessions Add Up To
More than fifteen thousand people filled the San Diego Convention Center for Esri’s 46th annual User Conference this year, with roughly that many more watching by livestream from 117 countries. Taken session by session, the program is a wide survey of a mapping platform still expanding in every direction. Taken together, it resolves into a...
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...