What's is a Polaroid Cellphone, Alex?
Buster Crabbe was flying a long time ago...Ol' country doctor McCoy performed miracles just by waving salt-shaker medical devices over his patients. He not only performed these miracles aboard the Starship Enterprise...even in the Forbidden Zone...
100% Photogrammetry ...
Mighty slick processor. Betcha its memory fills up PDQ! I can do the same thing with my Forensic Photogrammetry packages, including my own that I wrote, but it takes me forever to (manually) do just a tiny segment of what that system claims. If it really works, it's really amazing!
Zero scanning; it's all photogrammetry with dynamic sensor input for camera station position & attitude updates. Those updates allow initial condition parameter input. That sort of thing involves Kalman Filtering - a real-time version of Least Squares. That is some really hairy math!
If there's sufficient memory to store the covariance matrices, post-processed error propagation can really deliver accuracy results of computed positions for validation. Solve for the eigenvectors & eigenvalues and you get 3D error ellipsoids! Hot stuff, indeed.
Cliff
Have you worked with any of the software from Photo Mess Systeme?
I tried to get my "contacts" at Professional Surveyor to snag me a copy of some of the software to "review", but whenever they went by their booth at Intergeo, there was never anyone home
Nope; it looks very similar in capabilities ...
to PhotoModeler and iWitness. The "self-calibration" is a nice idea, but in reality it takes many dozens of images from the same camera in order for the calibration solution to be meaningful. I suspect the AutoCad line following and point-connection routines are going to involve mostly handwork ... only "meshing" seems to largely work in "auto" mode.
I suspect this might be related to the Rollei software & camera systems that have been available for years.
Note that you can download a free demo copy of the software that will work for 10 points.
What about the Trimble V10 rover rod? Does it really work?
It's not LIDAR.
It's photogrammetry, using overlapping photos from the video feed and input from the motion sensors to "hint".
Impressive processing.
I already own a Hand held Laser Scanner.
I would be excited to hear more surveyor Professionals and Educators help lead this technology.