From 2014 to 2024
It’s hard to believe that ten years ago, in the summer of 2014, Pointscene was just getting started. Our journey began with the simple idea of collecting and sharing laser scanning data. What started as a small project soon grew into something much bigger – a platform that many of you now use to compare and control your worksites.
In this article, we’ll be looking back at how our software, Pointscene, developed over the years. Here is a video showcasing the development. The music is done Suno.com (AI).
Pointscene’s Launch in 2016
By 2016, we were ready to release our first version of Pointscene. We called it “The media of 3D information”. It was kind of like the “YouTube for point clouds”. We had support for LAS, LAZ, and ZIP (for E57 files including 360 images). We quickly gained interest worldwide and got new users for our platform. From day-one, we always had the goal of keeping everything as simple as possible. So that everyone can enjoy using point clouds without heavy desktop software.
Evolution in 2018
Fast forward to 2018, and we were rolling out a new 2D and 3D map interface. This was a game-changer, making the platform look and feel much like what you see today. We also made sure it worked smoothly on mobile devices and started supporting various drone data.
During these 2 years, we had shifted from a point-cloud-centric mindset to focusing solely on infrastructure construction projects and their needs. We realized that having a 2D map user interface was necessary and needed by our users. Users could see their reality capture data and filter it by dates.
Innovations in 2020
By 2020, we had created our most unique tools and features, which are still today the most popular ones. We enabled our sharing tools to connect orthophotos to other software like QGIS, Autodesk Civil 3D, Infrakit, and ArcGIS.
Our second favorite tool is our Volume tool, which had its first version as a separate report page. You could see the location on the map, the cut and fill values and a separate 3D view of the calculated volume.
We also created the Compare tool, letting users compare two orthophotos side-by-side with a simple slider.
Enhancements in 2021
2021 was another big year for us. We gave our 2D user interface a fresh look and improved our volume, profile, and compare tool to make them even more user-friendly.
We created a brand-new 3D viewer for point clouds and added support for LandXMLs, IFC models and 360 images to be viewed all together.
Looking Ahead to 2024
Now, as we look ahead to summer 2024, we’re excited about the new features coming your way. We’re focusing on making our 2D and 3D viewers even better with more user-friendly updates and tools. One of our favorites so far is the clip tool in 3D for viewing cross-sections in 2D and 3D. Another is our contour lines visualization for surface models.
We’re about to launch the Create Drone Maps photogrammetric processing and a new upload file page, which will make getting your data from the field to the office faster than ever. Here is a sneakpeak of the new Upload files page. We’ll be soon streamlining our upload process to have all uploads in one page. We have also updated the backend so that the processing time is much faster. With a typical size drone orthophoto (geographical extend 1200m x 500m) the processing time used to be 20 minutes and will soon be 10 minutes, so time is cut in half! For the point cloud from the same area the processing time is now 51 minutes and will soon be only 13 minutes! A whopping improvement of being nearly 4 times faster!
Conclusion
Looking back, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. We’ve always aimed to make reality capture data management easy and accessible for everyone. As we celebrate this 10-year milestone, we’re excited to keep pushing the boundaries and bringing you even more great tools and features.
Thanks for being part of our journey. Here’s to the next decade of Pointscene!
PS. Stay tuned for more 10-year celebrations posts coming up and the upcoming releases!