Since there’s precious little information out there about Euclideon’s hotly anticipated hologram room debuting at SPAR, I got in touch with the company for some hard details. In an email exchange, Euclideon senior developer Derek Van Tonder explained how the hologram room works, what SPAR attendees can expect from their demonstration, and how Euclideon intends to scale the technology for many different kinds of GIS professionals.
SPAR: Can you give me an overview of how the room works and what technology is involved?
Derek Von Tonder: Euclideon’s Hologram Room uses a series of customized projectors, custom motion sensors and cordless 3D shutter glasses to immerse you inside Euclideon’s Unlimited Detail solid point clouds in real time. Users can instantly open very large scenes and see every angle of the object – from walking through a forest to peering underneath objects.
SPAR: Who can expect to find the hologram room useful? Or, put differently, who are you marketing this to?
Derek Von Tonder: Initially we expect that the Hologram Room will be most useful for organization with demonstration or public consultation requirements – for example, if an organization is seeking approval for a new development or asking for investment they could display a CAD model of a new building in the middle of an aerial LiDAR scene to give decision makers a better idea of what the final product will look like. Later on, as Euclideon adds many different GIS tools the room will become more of a general purpose 3D mark-up environment useful to many different types of GIS professionals.
SPAR: Does the room allow a 3D professional to do things with scan data that he or she couldn’t do before?
Derek Von Tonder: With Euclideon’s Hologram Room, users are able to literally step inside their scan data, with no cords or other restrictions. They can do this with point cloud data of any size – even into the terabytes – with no decimation or degradation. Users are able to produce and view photo-realistic 3D scans with very short, easy workflows. This is a completely new capability in the GIS and metrology industry.
SPAR: What can attendees expect from Euclideon’s demonstration?
Derek Von Tonder: Attendees at SPAR will be a given a short overview of the many different types of content that can be loaded and displayed by the room. They will see the fidelity and accuracy produced by our solidscan engine, as well as integration with the Design world through the visualization of CAD models. Euclideon will also have a number of screens displaying the same content at our stand for users to examine items of interest in more depth.