This is an interview with one of the founders of Safe Software, Dale Lutz (an all-around nice guy and a thought leader in the geospatial world). Dale walks you thought the evolution of the problems that Safe is solving, and gives you insight into the fallacy of the one “file to rule them all” theory and talks about trends in the geospatial file formats and data exchange in general.
We also discuss the future of Geospatial as an industry and from a practitioner’s perspective.
This episode is sponsored by HiveMapper
A platform that takes video and creates 3D mapping layers based on that data. The video can be from avariety of different sensors, does not need to be vertically looking down on the geography and each 3D output is georeferenced!
Instead of one long antenna that sends one big pulse at one time and then collects the pulses that come back, SAR have a much smaller antenna that sends lots of pulses in quick succession over time as the satellite goes through space.It “listens” to the pulses that come back to it when it moves through its orbit.That’s why the name synthetic is applied to the radar.
I liked the geospatial component of things. I enjoyed solving a problem and then seeing the result. It wasn’t just a Microsoft Excel model or some database table. It was something I could visualize in GIS software. If there had been a path to becoming a more in-depth GIS analyst at this company, I might have stayed on it.
What is a voxel?. It’s a 3D volumetric pixel, a cube. But voxels are nothing new. They’ve been used extensively in two key areas within computing. Computer games render worlds and use voxels instead of polygons. Minecraft is a good example — it’s a voxel rendered world. Gaming companies love voxels for their multi-resolution capability over polygons. Robotics uses voxels for image processing to reduce the size of LIDAR point clouds and to create small dynamic maps — or what we call VOG (Voxel Occupancy Grid) — for robots.