Bentley Systems has been named a co-founder of the new Cesium Consortium, along with Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI).
The Cesium Consortium is an open-source, browser-based virtual globe, first developed by AGI in 2011 for the aerospace and defense communities.
Cesium streams massive datasets through a browser to desktops, tablets and smartphones for geospatial viewing. The consortium will collaborate on a roadmap to accelerate and support the requirements for building infrastructure modeling.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced a comprehensive settlement agreement with aerial photography company SkyPan International of Chicago. The agreement resolves enforcement cases that alleged the company operated unmanned aircraft (UAS) in congested airspace over New York City and Chicago, and violated airspace regulations and aircraft operating rules.
Under the terms of the agreement, SkyPan will pay a $200,000 civil penalty. The company also agrees to pay an additional $150,000 if it violates Federal Aviation Regulations in the next year, and $150,000 more if it fails to comply with the terms of the settlement agreement.
SkyPan also agrees to work with the FAA to release three public service announcements in the next 12 months to support the FAA’s public outreach campaigns that encourage drone operators to learn and comply with UAS regulations.
The agreement settles enforcement cases involving a $1.9 million civil penalty that the FAA proposed against SkyPan International Inc. of Chicago in October 2015. It is the largest civil penalty the agency has proposed against a UAS operator.
TCarta Marine LLC of Denver, Colorado, has merged with Proteus Geo of Oxford, England, to create a global mapping company that provides bathymetric and marine data sets from the shallow coastal zone out to the continental shelf.
The new company is called TCarta Marine and will maintain offices in Denver and Oxford.
“By merging, we believe the merged company provides a wider and more sophisticated range of products than any other supplier worldwide,” said TCarta Marine CEO David Critchley. “TCarta Marine is now a one-stop shop for bathymetric and marine data.”
TCarta Marine will continue offering all existing product lines from the two companies, as well as new products and services under development. Primary markets served will be engineering, oil and gas, government and defense with expansion planned into the insurance, 3D modeling and aquaculture industries.
“Our goal is to make it easier for the marine community to obtain and use quality mapping data,” said TCarta Marine President Kyle Goodrich. “To support every phase of offshore projects, we now offer lower resolution bathymetry for regional planning as well as high-resolution, highly accurate seafloor modeling for precise coastal engineering activities. Additionally, we offer a range of global and regional marine basemaps.”
In recent years, TCarta Marine and Proteus Geo collaborated on many projects and had numerous clients in common due to the complementary nature of their product lines.
David Critchley established Proteus Geo in the United Kingdom in 2011 to leverage a new technology that derives high-accuracy seafloor survey and seabed classification information from multispectral satellite imagery. Operating at a fraction of the cost of traditional ship and airborne bathymetric technologies, the Proteus methodology has been deployed extensively in energy exploration, infrastructure engineering and environmental applications in shallow-water coastal zones.
“The two-meter satellite-derived bathymetric data can be derived to depths of 35 meters depending on water clarity and every depth has an uncertainty value assigned,” said Critchley.
TCarta Marine was started in 2008 by Kyle Goodrich to fill an enormous gap in quality bathymetric data from the littoral zone out to the base of the continental shelf, distance often spanning hundreds of kilometers. The firm developed proprietary techniques for aggregating seafloor depth data from numerous medium- to coarse-resolution sources, including navigation charts, ship tracklines, and boat surveys. TCarta Marine has built an off-the-shelf line of 90- and 30-meter GIS-ready products covering the Earth’s most important marine areas.
“Our bathymetric products are available via annual subscription for streaming directly into our clients’ GIS and mapping applications,” said Goodrich. “Oil, gas and renewable energy companies have become major users of TCarta Marine products.”
As president of the new TCarta Marine, Goodrich will focus on developing additional products and innovative methods for delivering them. The global company seeks to expand its foothold in traditional marine markets and cultivate new applications for seafloor data. Critchley, as CEO of TCarta Marine, will be responsible for business development in new geographic regions of the world.
In the near term, TCarta Marine and Proteus Geo customers can look forward to purchasing the existing 90-, 30- and 2-meter resolution product lines online through a new web portal, now under development. Information can be found and orders placed now through the new unified TCarta Marine website at www.TCartaMarine.com.
Proteus FZC, an affiliated company of Proteus Geo based in the United Arab Emirates, will remain a stand-alone company offering terrestrial geospatial and marine consulting services in the Middle East.
TCarta Marine LLC of Denver, Colorado, has merged with Proteus Geo of Oxford, England, to create a global mapping company that provides bathymetric and marine data sets from the shallow coastal zone out to the continental shelf.
The new company is called TCarta Marine and will maintain offices in Denver and Oxford.
“By merging, we believe the merged company provides a wider and more sophisticated range of products than any other supplier worldwide,” said TCarta Marine CEO David Critchley. “TCarta Marine is now a one-stop shop for bathymetric and marine data.”
TCarta Marine will continue offering all existing product lines from the two companies, as well as new products and services under development. Primary markets served will be engineering, oil and gas, government and defense with expansion planned into the insurance, 3D modeling and aquaculture industries.
“Our goal is to make it easier for the marine community to obtain and use quality mapping data,” said TCarta Marine President Kyle Goodrich. “To support every phase of offshore projects, we now offer lower resolution bathymetry for regional planning as well as high-resolution, highly accurate seafloor modeling for precise coastal engineering activities. Additionally, we offer a range of global and regional marine basemaps.”
In recent years, TCarta Marine and Proteus Geo collaborated on many projects and had numerous clients in common due to the complementary nature of their product lines.
David Critchley established Proteus Geo in the United Kingdom in 2011 to leverage a new technology that derives high-accuracy seafloor survey and seabed classification information from multispectral satellite imagery. Operating at a fraction of the cost of traditional ship and airborne bathymetric technologies, the Proteus methodology has been deployed extensively in energy exploration, infrastructure engineering and environmental applications in shallow-water coastal zones.
“The two-meter satellite-derived bathymetric data can be derived to depths of 35 meters depending on water clarity and every depth has an uncertainty value assigned,” said Critchley.
TCarta Marine was started in 2008 by Kyle Goodrich to fill an enormous gap in quality bathymetric data from the littoral zone out to the base of the continental shelf, distance often spanning hundreds of kilometers. The firm developed proprietary techniques for aggregating seafloor depth data from numerous medium- to coarse-resolution sources, including navigation charts, ship tracklines, and boat surveys. TCarta Marine has built an off-the-shelf line of 90- and 30-meter GIS-ready products covering the Earth’s most important marine areas.
“Our bathymetric products are available via annual subscription for streaming directly into our clients’ GIS and mapping applications,” said Goodrich. “Oil, gas and renewable energy companies have become major users of TCarta Marine products.”
As president of the new TCarta Marine, Goodrich will focus on developing additional products and innovative methods for delivering them. The global company seeks to expand its foothold in traditional marine markets and cultivate new applications for seafloor data. Critchley, as CEO of TCarta Marine, will be responsible for business development in new geographic regions of the world.
In the near term, TCarta Marine and Proteus Geo customers can look forward to purchasing the existing 90-, 30- and 2-meter resolution product lines online through a new web portal, now under development. Information can be found and orders placed now through the new unified TCarta Marine website at www.TCartaMarine.com.
Proteus FZC, an affiliated company of Proteus Geo based in the United Arab Emirates, will remain a stand-alone company offering terrestrial geospatial and marine consulting services in the Middle East.
The year 2016 was full of political, environmental and global events that will have lasting impacts all around the world.
In the spirit of pictures being worth a thousand words, DigitalGlobe is offering a top 10 list of satellite images that defined 2016.
Here is the first, for January. Click here to see the full list.
Mapping firm adds nearly 2.5 million images to inventory
The Sanborn Map Company has added 35 newly available oblique imagery datasets to its inventory. Sanborn specializes in acquisition and processing of high-resolution oblique aerial imagery.
In 2016, the firm collected more than 2.5 million new images, covering more than 12,000 square miles.
Sanborn offers its Oblique Imagery Solutions as a licensed product available with Sanborn Oblique Analyst 2.0 and the firm’s cloud service, allowing customers to securely store, analyze and access their data. This complete package provides an end-to-end solution. Sanborn’s data licensing policy offers additional value for customers.
The new 2016 data also is accessible on a pay-as-you-go basis through Sanborn’s new Mezurit.com subscription oblique imagery service.
“As our customers continue to recognize how oblique imagery can streamline workflows through greatly enhanced visualization and analysis of all types of infrastructure, Sanborn will have one of the nation’s most current and accurate oblique data sets ready for them,” said Jason Caldwell, Sanborn’s vice president of business development and sales.
Bentley Systems has been named a co-founder of the new Cesium Consortium, along with Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI).
Cesium is an open source, browser-based virtual globe, first developed by AGI in 2011 for the aerospace and defense communities.
Cesium’s performance in streaming very large datasets through a browser to desktops, tablets, and smart phones has enabled it to become the virtual globe of choice for geospatial viewing. The consortium will now enable AGI and Bentley to collaborate on the Cesium roadmap to better accelerate and support the requirements for building infrastructure modeling (BIM) and for owners of infrastructure assets.
In addition, the consortium will support feature development, priority bug fixes, expansion of outreach efforts, and the hosting of social coding events such as code sprints and bug bashes.
Bentley Systems is adopting Cesium to visualize and interact with highly detailed infrastructure engineering models set in the reality context of their surrounding environment. The digital engineering models are created with Bentley’s MicroStation and BIM applications, and the context is provided through reality meshes, created from digital photography and scanning devices using Bentley’s ContextCapture.
“We are thrilled to join the Cesium Consortium as a founding member,” said Keith Bentley, founder and CTO of Bentley Systems. “I commend AGI for their leadership and vision, not only for creating an open source solution for highly performant 3D web-based applications but, more importantly, for fostering an ecosystem to leverage it. I expect Bentley and our users will build Cesium-based Web clients for immersively viewing BIM models, reality context, asset databases, IoT streams, and myriad other geo 3D services. We look forward to working hand in hand with AGI and future members of the consortium to expand Cesium as an open standard.”
Bentley’s work to date illustrates the advantages that the infrastructure community can expect from Cesium. Data created with both MicroStation and ContextCapture can be exported to 3D Tiles, an open format developed by the Cesium team to stream massive geo-coordinated 3D datasets. Cesium will enable Bentley users to stream their digital engineering models over the Web to desktop and mobile devices with unprecedented performance and precision.
“We are very excited to collaborate with Bentley. Bentley shares our vision and technical approach and has already done some fantastic work with Cesium and 3D Tiles,” said Patrick Cozzi, Cesium founder. “Bentley’s support will be key within our submission team proposing 3D Tiles as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Community Standard.”
For more information on how to join and accelerate the Cesium Consortium, contact [email protected].
Bentley Systems has been named a co-founder of the new Cesium Consortium, along with Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI).
Cesium is an open source, browser-based virtual globe, first developed by AGI in 2011 for the aerospace and defense communities.
Cesium’s performance in streaming very large datasets through a browser to desktops, tablets, and smart phones has enabled it to become the virtual globe of choice for geospatial viewing. The consortium will now enable AGI and Bentley to collaborate on the Cesium roadmap to better accelerate and support the requirements for building infrastructure modeling (BIM) and for owners of infrastructure assets.
In addition, the consortium will support feature development, priority bug fixes, expansion of outreach efforts, and the hosting of social coding events such as code sprints and bug bashes.
Bentley Systems is adopting Cesium to visualize and interact with highly detailed infrastructure engineering models set in the reality context of their surrounding environment. The digital engineering models are created with Bentley’s MicroStation and BIM applications, and the context is provided through reality meshes, created from digital photography and scanning devices using Bentley’s ContextCapture.
“We are thrilled to join the Cesium Consortium as a founding member,” said Keith Bentley, founder and CTO of Bentley Systems. “I commend AGI for their leadership and vision, not only for creating an open source solution for highly performant 3D web-based applications but, more importantly, for fostering an ecosystem to leverage it. I expect Bentley and our users will build Cesium-based Web clients for immersively viewing BIM models, reality context, asset databases, IoT streams, and myriad other geo 3D services. We look forward to working hand in hand with AGI and future members of the consortium to expand Cesium as an open standard.”
Bentley’s work to date illustrates the advantages that the infrastructure community can expect from Cesium. Data created with both MicroStation and ContextCapture can be exported to 3D Tiles, an open format developed by the Cesium team to stream massive geo-coordinated 3D datasets. Cesium will enable Bentley users to stream their digital engineering models over the Web to desktop and mobile devices with unprecedented performance and precision.
“We are very excited to collaborate with Bentley. Bentley shares our vision and technical approach and has already done some fantastic work with Cesium and 3D Tiles,” said Patrick Cozzi, Cesium founder. “Bentley’s support will be key within our submission team proposing 3D Tiles as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Community Standard.”
For more information on how to join and accelerate the Cesium Consortium, contact [email protected].
Aerial mapping company Bluesky has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Bird.i to provide online, instantaneous visualization of its high-resolution aerial imagery.
Bluesky has created and maintains a high-resolution, up-to-date and accurate archive of aerial images in the United Kingdom. Established in 2016, Bird.i has developed a platform for accessing satellite, airborne and UAV imagery with a plug-and-play API that works within mapping and location-based applications.
“The partnership with Bluesky will allow businesses across multiple industry sectors to exploit location information more accurately and efficiently,” said Corentin Guillo, founder and CEO of Bird.i. “Our commitment is to serve the most accurate and recent images available, such as those on offer from Bluesky, to our clients for mass consumption of instantaneously accessible ‘image views’. Working in partnership with Bluesky, we will streamline the overall process of image consumption and open new markets”.
“We are delighted to partner with Bird.i because we believe that instant visualization of our detailed and accurate aerial images offers great benefits to businesses,” said Rachel Tidmarsh, managing director of Bluesky. “We see in Bird.i an innovative way forward, simplifying online access and accelerating the visualization of our images for many applications that rely on evidence-based information.”
The agreement between the two companies will give subscribers to Bird.i’s API the ability to integrate Bluesky’s high-quality aerial images within its existing mapping applications and location-based services.
For nearly two decades, SPAR 3D has been the premier vendor-neutral event for the application of 3D technology in industry. But the surge in innovation and commercial uses for 3D technologies has brought opportunity for expansion.
In 2017, SPAR 3D will highlight cutting-edge innovation in 3D technologies from input to output, covering 3D sensing, 3D processing and 3D visualization tools. The expo and conference will take place April 3-5 in Houston, Texas.
In the exhibit hall, new products and hands-on demonstrations will be showcased.
Paul Doherty of the Digit Group will speak on “The Emerging Power of Smart Cities and the Role of 3D, UAVs and the Conquering of Space.”
Because of the uncanny timing and convergence of global market conditions, technology innovation, social wants and government needs, a smart cities market has exploded on a global scale that dwarfs any previous notion of the value given to the built environment.
Sometimes described as part of Big Data or the Internet of Things programs, Smart City initiatives being implemented in many urban environments around the world today require accurate and authenticated data in which to work properly, but require 3D data generation and display innovations.
Doherty will explore trends, solutions and implementations from greenfield and existing Smart Cities real estate developments from China, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the United States. He will explore the market-making abilities of Smart Cities that are developing solutions using 3D and UAVs, as well as the emerging privatization of outer space.
Sessions will cover:
Market-specific sessions will focused on the end-to-end application of 3D tools.
Also, an “Intro to 3D Technology” track for professionals new to 3D will be offered.
Learn more about SPAR 3D at the event website.
Farmstar, a service of Airbus Defence and Space and ARVALIS – Institut du végétal for precision farming based on satellite information, has been further improved.
New images acquired by the SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 satellites will make it possible to issue intra-field recommendations for areas as small as 1 hectare. Also, new interactive advice is provided for nitrogen input at the 1-centimeter ear stage.
Automatic and manual modulation files are accessible to all farmers via the Farmstar web portal. An additional advice for calculating the nitrogen input at the 1-centimeter ear stage enables this input to be broken down and adjusted for wheat, barley and triticale crops. The nitrogen fertilization recommendations now take into account the objectives of the Proteins Plan for wheat quality thanks to new nitrogen requirement specifications for soft wheat, to optimize how this two-fold yield–protein content objective is addressed.
These new developments come at the right time: after an extremely difficult year, due to exceptionally poor meteorological conditions, French farmers are looking to save on farm inputs while continuing to manage their crops sustainably and with a focus on environmental protection.
The number of farmers signed up for the service has constantly risen over the past 15 years. Nearly 800,000 hectares of plots were monitored by Farmstar last season, enabling more than 18,000 farmers to save time and money through precise management of the exact needs of their crops.
Farmstar is a service distributed by the cooperatives, chambers of agriculture and traders dedicated to precision agriculture and crop management developed by Airbus Defence and Space and ARVALIS – Institut du végétal, in partnership with Terres Inovia.
Throughout the season, the service provides reliable information that can be directly used by farmers to help them quickly make relevant decisions. This advice, combining satellite, UAV and aircraft imagery with agronomic expertise, exposes the real need of plants within each plot at different key stages in the crop growth and allows the right amount of inputs to be added in the right places at the right time.
DigitalGlobe has released the first image from its new WorldView-4 satellite.
Captured on Nov. 26, the first image shows the Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Shibuya, Tokyo, and can be downloaded from the WorldView-4 microsite. The site hosted events during the 1964 Olympic Games and will again host international competition when the games return to Tokyo in 2020.
The successful launch of WorldView-4 on Nov. 11 marked the culmination of months of planning, including unforeseen delays caused by the nearby Canyon Fire that impacted Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
WorldView-4 is the fifth and most advanced satellite in DigitalGlobe’s active, industry-leading constellation, and will more than double the company’s capacity to collect the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite images for its customers.
The SpaceView 110 camera aboard WorldView-4, and the satellite’s primary payload, was developed by Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corporation. From an altitude of 617 kilometers, SpaceView is capable of collecting imagery with a panchromatic resolution of 31 centimeters and 1.24 meter multispectral resolution, meaning it will be able to distinguish data points just a foot apart.