iPhone iPad LiDAR 3D scanning for Surveyors

The app works pretty good. A few comments on it:

1. We use it as a crew site picture supplement/replacement. While we do not pull precise measurements from it, it is very useful for smaller scans where a crew wants to paint a 3d picture of what they see. We find it quite useful for quick, rough & relative measurement verification.

2. I would recommend updating Dot3d/Scan3d to work with the Carlson BRX7. There is already the licensing agreement and I imagine "Carlson shops" would be more likely to try out the product if it was compatible with a BRX7 or BRX6. Not having to set April Targets for when we are just doing a rough site documentation would be appreciated. The Trimble DA2 kit looks like it would fit on a standard survey pole so this seems more of a software than hardware limitation. Buying another Leica or Trimble GNSS is a non-starter for us.

3. We limit our single scans to around 1000 frames or they crash. Making it easier to stitch multiple scans would be appreciated. We currently just mash them together in CloudCompare or Recap. Again, it's mainly for visual site documentation and we do not have a terrestrial scanner.

4. Stability of the program could always improve for rendering/GCP mapping. We never output the scans at full quality as they almost always crash for us. As hard drive sizes are a concern, this is not a big deal as we typically output between 25% to 50%.

Overall, we enjoy using the program for site/structure documentation.

@jaccen Thank you for this feedback. We really appreciate it. 

I will say that we are seeing many very large scans these days, including from surveyors. Many of them in excess 4000 frames. Of course the larger the scene the higher the need for good control! We do pride ourselves on getting the best data we can out of inexpensive and easy to use sensors. 

As far as the Carlson BRX7 goes, we would be happy to have that integration. I don't believe that today Carlson has a collector for iOS.  For the Leica FLX100 plus and the Trimble DA2 integration, they each have collectors that work on the iOS platform and they each have a special handle to hold the iOS device and the receiver. So offsets are available along with the real time connection to the corrections feed. We are anticipating working with other devices soon and, again, we are hoping that we can have an integration with Carlson receivers soon as well. 

In regards to your rendering issue, what software are you using?  Yes, large point clouds can be troublesome in some software solutions.  Are you using any of the solutions that read our compressed .dp format?  We have over 30 software partners that read that format and it is often easier to bring the .dp file up in their software than do an export. If you have a software vendor that is not reading our .dp file format please let me know and we will reach out to see if they are interested in reading it. Our DLL is very easy to implement. 

Thanks again and I look forward to keeping the conversation open with you.