The speed, low cost and ease of use of SLAM-based handheld lidar scanners have opened new use cases for 3D capture that weren’t possible with traditional methods.

Sean Higgins wrote in American Surveyor how Paracosm is at the forefront of this mobile mapping trend with its flagship product, the PX-80 handheld lidar scanner. Higgins noted the Paracosm scanner has helped:

“Surveyors to capture large indoor and outdoor areas that would have been prohibitively slow with conventional methods, enabled AEC firms to capture building sites with a frequency that they never considered before, and allowed total beginners to capture 3D data that would have once required a team of trained professionals.”

The article added, the PX-80 “features a Velodyne VLP-16 (Puck) lidar – often seen in autonomous vehicles – alongside a panoramic camera and a survey-grade inertial measurement unit (IMU), all of which it uses to produce accurate 3D point clouds and automatically colorize those point clouds while the user moves at a walking pace.”

Paracosm recently partnered with Velodyne at CES 2020, showcasing its mobile lidar scanning technology in the Velodyne booth.

To read the entire story, please go to: Handheld SLAM-based lidar scanners are changing the way we think about 3D capture