SAN RAFAEL, Calif. – Autodesk announced today it has acquired Allpoint Systems, a software firm based in Pittsburgh, Pa., that specializes in automatic point cloud registration and working with large point cloud sets. The company’s customers are mostly in the transportation and building sectors. Terms of the deal were not released.
At the most recent SPAR Europe, the firm unveiled its FastTrack product, which is a solution that allows for quick terrestrial laser scanning, with each scan registered in real time and then uploaded to the cloud for easy sharing.
In a release accompanying the announcement, Autodesk said, “the acquisition of the Allpoint Systems technology will bring expertise in and advanced technology for reality capture that will help accelerate Autodesk’s ongoing development of cloud-based tools for reality capture.”
The company’s reality capture technology was bolstered with a fall 2011 acquisition of Alice Labs, which specialized in working with large point clouds and had created plug ins for Autodesk products, so that point clouds could be used as the basis for modeling in packages like Maya and 3ds Max.
That buy brought Elmer Bol, Alice Labs’ founder, who now serves as director of reality capture.
This buy brings six members of the Allpoint development team, including founder Aaron Morris, who came out of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. He originally focused on autonomous robots, working with laser scanners and point clouds to feedback information to the robots, before focusing on point cloud registration solutions.
The bad news for Allpoint fans is that, as they did with Alice Labs’ products, Autodesk will cease the sale of all Allpoint products. Allpoint will continue support of contracted customers until those contracts expire or are terminated.
SPAR 3D continues to report on this story.
