DENVER – Smart GeoMetrics announced here at the International Lidar Mapping Forum it has reached an agreement to serve as the North American distributor for French firm Viametris’ I-MMS (Indoor Mobile Mapping System) indoor laser scanning unit.
Sam Billingsley, VP at Smart GeoMetrics and a blogger here at SPARPointGroup.com, said he’s been waiting for an indoor scanning solution that he felt was stable and fully realized. “One of the reasons I’ve waited for indoor mobile scanning was because as long as I needed to keep a soldering iron in my kit, I didn’t want to do it,” said Billingley. “I’m not into that level of R&D. I enjoy what I can do when I put working pieces of equipment together, but I want to be building systems rather than actually stitching them together.”
SmartGeometrics will be both using a I-MMS unit for providing indoor mapping and scanning services, plus reselling units throughout North America.
“What people come to me for is equipment and new methodology,” Billingsley said. “I’ve got three or four jobs to help people use static interiors right now and this could help them do it in a severely reduced time frame, and in some cases for reduced cost.”
“We’ll see some rentals of it,” he predicted, “and I’ll send a technician with it initially, but if it’s multiple times with the same company we’ll offer training and work in that rental facet.”
Initially, he sees the I-MMS unit as a good fit for just about “anything BIM oriented.”
“Especially for hospitals,” Billingsley said, “where the key is speed. With the I-MMS, you’re in and out of the environment quicker. Of course, it’s more expensive at a day rate than a static scanner, but for something like a surgical wing, where you can’t just shut it down, there’s a big benefit to just getting out of their way, and that gets you started faster on your data processing quicker as well.”
For now, he said he’s also confident that the quality of the data is better enough than what you can get from photogrammetry or something like what Matterport will debut this summer to justify the cost.
“Of course, we have to look at what the lifespan on the [I-MMS] equipment is,” he said. “There’s no doubt about that … We’re going to have to keep an eye on it. But the simple fact is we’ve gotta get faster, gotta get cheaper, gotta get easier. And I think Viametris gets at all three.”
