Creating Smart Digital Realities with Reality Capture

Author: Burkhard Boeckem

With reality capture, the world can be completely digitised and digitalised, creating valuable digital twins. These are a replica of the physical world — city streets, power grids, construction sites, factories, and more, which are used to digitally transform our cities, infrastructures and environments.

There is a long list of applications and use cases for reality capture from industries spanning engineering and construction to project scheduling of buildings on time and built to plan, to monitoring the evolution of a mine, making manufacturing truly digital, or in media and entertainment where information from the digital twin of a film set is used to make edits in a post or virtual production.

The act of reality capturing is important for the following reasons:

• It enables users to create products such as real-world high definition maps or 3D design models
• It enables virtual design, simulation and testing based on the real world (e.g., if you need to check the safety of an autonomous vehicle using reality capture you can carry out driver simulations)
• Finally, reality capture also enables you to be able to develop autonomous services including, for example, auto collision systems at a reduced cost in testing.

The more quality data sources you have, the more insightful and valuable your digital twin will be. Our world-leading sensor and visualisation services portfolio includes terrestrial laser scanners like the Leica RTC360, imaging scanners such as the Leica BLK360 and the Leica BLK2GO, and our mobile mapping solutions (e.g., the Leica Pegasus:Backpack) and — now, introduced earlier this year, our HxDR platform. HxDR is a new cloud-based, digital reality visualisation platform. It creates accurate digital representations of the real world through the seamless fusion of reality capture data from airborne, ground and mobile sensors, which are used to visualise and share 3D design projects and models within real-world context of the data that’s been captured.

Hexagon is uniquely placed to accelerate the innovation in Smart Digital Reality and connected and autonomous technologies through its sensor and visualisation portfolio — and the connection of value that we find between them.

It’s a truly exciting time to be in the industry, and I look forward to sharing with you our next set of innovations that will bring us a step further in delivering on our vision of an autonomous future.