Remember that company that promised unlimited detail for games? Well they've moved on to a slightly different market. Spatial Data sets.
http://www.euclideon.com/

Recently Euclideon have setup a demo project for Logan City Council with all of its ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) and LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) points... Just as idea of the magnitude of points, the complete ALS dataset we have averages 8-10 points per square meter. That's well in excess of 100 Million points. We also have some other point cloud data (Mapped by a LiDAR Scanner that sits on the back of a Ute Like this.) Our project data set is only ~13GB created from ~50GB of ALS data and their site claims they can handle up to 140TBs.

The software flies through the data very smoothly on a mid-spec machine (It's 'High-Spec' at work, but my 2 yo gaming computer is better than it) and it doesn't skip a beat or lurch or anything.

We have 3 different demo projects. 1 with Aerial Photography, 1 with colourised points and 1 with Aerial and the 3D street scan + photos (Think Google Street view, but with higher res and you can actually measure off everything)

The software only has basic measuring tools at the moment (something they are going to build on) but can do Distance/Height etc. Controls took me a few min to get use to, and some others are pretty funny to watch as they try to control what handles like a spectator control in a FPS. Most people get the hang of it fairly quickly though. Another thing we also have in most LiDAR data is intensity information (how strong the return beam was) which is another thing they're working towards including in their software. This data can be used to map how thick vegetation and even what type of tree the Light point hit etc.

I didn't get a chance to have a sit down with the Devs (Boss went along) so I couldn't get many technical questions out. But I will get a chance to ask questions (one of which will be if they still have any focus on Games development) so if you have any to add I'll be happy to pass them along.

All in all it's a pretty cool package and I'm more excited for this stuff than I am for their gaming advancements. I'm very keen to see just how far they can take it. If we could combine this stuff with some of the flood mapping and prediction software it would be insanely cool. I'd love to watch exactly how the entire city would flood, real time, with programmed rain events.

Some images;

Shopping Centre Entrance, take a look at the 1/2 cars for how much detail was captured.


X,Y,Z points on the Shopping Centre Sign. All have the photo overlayed on them.


Point Detail on some Overhead Power Lines


Little Boxes on the hill side and they all look just like Ticky-Tacky and they all look just the same.
Colurised ALS data.

Scary, that raises some massive issues about privacy.

Yeah, the fact that you can display and fly through literally MILLIONS of points of data without any loading, lurching, jumping, rendering times.

Looks like awesome tech.

Imagine something like google street view... instead of being 'imagery' a rendered model.

Do they need investors (looks like a good option for the geospatial tech. end of the world/market)?

this has been around for ages.

They need to index the data on their servers to work with it.

We've tested the software and it is good, once the data is indexed... but you need to go through that first.

(my job primarily involves working with data as you showed)

last edited by Jerry at 21:11:57 10/Dec/12

Does this triangulate data? Can you get volumes from it? Otherwise I don't see the point besides showing stuff off visually

Thanks a lot for this post. This is very interesting in my field of intelligent vehicle systems. We work with LIDAR all the time but I did not know of these companies and councils collecting this kind of data.

Wouldn't be able to tell FPS but I can fly through it at a pretty impressive speed without it skipping or jumping. Loading time is <5 seconds from the desktop to an open project database.

I'd like to know if each of these voxel points can store light, specular, opacity or any other sort of information, I assume it's currently storing only translation and colour (RGB) values. I'm guessing if you start adding more info per point the data size is going to increase exponentially.