Category Archives: Surveying
Technology That Tracks
A singular railway system provides a linear path from construction to maintenance on the Tren Maya. Mexico’s Tren Maya (Maya Train) has been lauded as “the most important public work in the world” by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Designed to boost economic and social development in the country’s southeast––a decades-long underdeveloped region––the 1,500-kilometer...
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. Walking past the Vexcel booth at INTERGEO 2025, you see Merlin, Osprey 4.2, Condor and Dragon 4.2 front and center: sleek housings, crisp...
The Trimble Line: Accuracy, Trust and the Future of Connected Work
For more than two decades, Trimble Applanix has shaped the practice of mobile mapping and survey-grade positioning in air, land and marine domains. Today, it sits at the center of Trimble’s broader move toward connected workflows, subscription-based performance, and end-to-end accuracy. Few people have watched that evolution more closely than Steve Woolven, who has overseen Trimble...
Precision or Nothing: The Millimeter-Level Future of Geomatics
By any measure, INTERGEO 2025 marks a turning point for Topcon. But for CEO Ivan Di Federico, the momentum behind this shift started well before the show floor opened. It began last November, when he outlined what would become Topcon 2.0—a reset of the company’s identity that re-centers geomatics as a foundational discipline and sets a...
Fire Season Preparedness: GIS Powers Southern California Sheriff Departments’ Evacuations
The deadly Los Angeles wildfires that claimed 30 lives, destroyed 15,000 structures, and burned 37,000 acres in January 2025 forebode Southern California’s year-round risk. Rugged terrain, fierce winds, and prolonged drought have made more intense fire occurrence the new normal—and unified first responder coordination a matter of life and death. At least four million California residents live in...