Video: What Needs to Change in the Reality Capture Industry?

Reality capture is an exciting field with virtually unlimited potential for anyone who has an interest in the digital documentation of real-world conditions and the curiosity to see where they can take it.

Unfortunately, the field also faces a significant hurdle: The lack of a common foundation in education, certification, and standardization. “We’re kind of the Wild West where there are no rules and regulations on our industry; we’re self-regulating,” says Chris Kercheval. “We need to make sure that we regulate in such a way that it moves everyone forward.”

Kercheval, a founding member of the reality capture group known as The Committee and a support specialist at Leica Geosystems, has a personal interest in seeing the industry thrive. As a surveyor and reality capture specialist who has been involved in numerous complex laser scanning projects over the last decade, Kercheval has experienced first-hand the tremendous benefits of the technology as well as the pitfalls of a poorly executed project.

We recently sat down with Chris to capture his insights on what needs to change in reality capture and what The Committee is doing to advance the industry. Watch the full interview, or browse the discussion highlights below.

What needs to change in reality capture right now?

The biggest change is the creation of a common foundation. We’re looking to create that foundation so that everyone has the same knowledge base to move from.

In reviewing multiple years of Cornerstone reports from the U.S. Institute of Building Documentation (USIBD), the users in the field have stated that accuracy is one of their top priorities. But over the last couple of years, accuracy has gone by the wayside in favor of speed. The hardware that’s coming out is designed with that user in mind who wants that speed. And the next generation is very techy; they want an app with one button to make everything very easy.  But we won’t see growth in the industry if we have a bunch of users who don’t actually know what the machine is doing.

What is The Committee, and what are its objectives?

The Committee initially started as the laser scan committee with USIBD. But USIBD’s main audience is professionals that are looking for increased certifications to add value to their knowledge and be able to provide a little bit more to their customer base. Conversely, our work is more aimed toward those who are new to the industry, so we decided to branch off and create a partnership with the USIBD.

Our goal is to get in front of the next generation of laser scanner operators and try to help them all be on the same level so when they get that first job, they can literally hit the ground running and have that knowledge base going in so they can get a fair head start into their career.

What initial steps are you working on?

Our main focus has been setting up the education committee and doing outreach to universities and colleges that would have an interest in providing certification for their students. We are working with University of Oregon, SAIT out of Calgary, and a couple of other universities here in the states to get supplemental materials included in their existing curriculum. From there, we want to expand to more colleges, universities, and disciplines. The certification process would involve an educational component where you learn the theory, practical application, and then a certification test. We’d be looking to do the certifications in person at a trade show, such as GeoWeek.

If everything goes according to our end goal, reality capture from the initial acquisition phase all the way through to registration and deliverable will have a client base that is educated on point clouds and how to best utilize the technology.

When will a certification from The Committee be available?

We’re maybe a year out from being able to do that in-person certification. The earliest would probably be in 2026 at GeoWeek.

Who is involved in this initiative?

We are a conglomerate group of users made up of multiple disciplines within the reality capture industry. We try to remain as vendor agnostic or neutral as possible and look at things from the greater whole. Reality capture is an industry that can cross over to just about anything. Architects can use a reality capture and put a point cloud to compare to a design. Forestry is trying to collect and understand data on an old-growth forest: What effect it does something small have on the overall health of the forest? Other applications are in industrial plants and in the entertainment/VFX area.

They’re all using point clouds but for very different end purposes. If you don’t know how to collect the point cloud for the data that you need in that area, you’re not necessarily going to come up with the best deliverable possible. It may work, but it may not be the best that you can get. As The Committee, we rely on each other and our experiences in these disciplines to help each other and also to come up with testing that would be beneficial to the greatest number of people.

The Committee also wants to create standards for the way hardware specifications are shared. Tell us more about that initiative.

We started looking at comparable industries and how change occurred that helped that industry grow. In the automotive industry, there was a senator in the ’50s that was tasked with creating a task force to look into shady practices by used car dealers. What ended up coming out of that was the Monroney sticker that we now see on the back left window of every new car that’s available. This sticker gives you an equivalent comparison at a glance between different products within the same industry.

We’ve decided to create a standardized spec sheet for laser scanners using all the information that’s available but reordered into an at-a-glance one-page sheet where all the metrics are in the same places. If someone were to come to The Committee and say, “Hey, we’re interested in these five scanners,” we can provide five one-page PDFs that they could lay out in a row and easily compare all of the same metrics because they’re in the same places.

How have these standardized spec sheets been received so far, both by users of the technology and the manufacturers?

On the user side, what we’re hearing is that it’s a much-needed change. People have said, “Thank you for making this easier.” It’s a lot easier to digest and make an informed purchasing decision when all the information is in the same place.

From the manufacturers side, we haven’t gotten much feedback yet. We’re aiming to develop a template that can be used as new products come out so that the end user has an easier time digesting that information and making that purchase decision.

What else is needed beyond standardized spec sheets?

What we’d like to do as The Committee is bring it back down to a base framework. That might involve some testing. SLAM, for instance, is really starting to gain traction. Last year at GeoWeek, we took 20 sensors from SLAM and terrestrial scanning and put them through the same course during the same timeframe. We were able to provide a comparison using slices of data from those different sensors.

We also did a five-year cost of ownership comparison. What does this cost to acquire? What do you need for software, for maintenance? And then at the end of five years, what’s your total cost of ownership?  Is this the best product for my customer base? And is this going to give them an outstanding deliverable?

What is the responsibility of the person making the technology decision?

I’m all in favor of getting an in-depth demo where you take the technology on site do some heavy lifting with the potential unit that you want to buy and putting it through its paces. More than anything now, it’s not the hardware; it’s the overall workflow. How easy is it to acquire the data that you need? Does it meet the specifications of your client? Does it fit into your existing structure so that you don’t have to change operating systems or buy a dedicated computer just to run one thing? We’re trying to look at everything as a whole and understand that workflow from beginning to end.

Five years ago, you might come across someone who had 10 different hardware products, three different softwares. Now they’ve combined all that into maybe one or two pieces of hardware and one software. So the focus is really on streamlining the workflow.

Where does artificial intelligence — and human intelligence —  fit in?

Everyone seems to be bringing up AI. They want to automate things, and they want things to move forward faster and easier. They want that easy button. But I’m afraid for what the industry could turn into in five or 10 years if all we focus on is AI and not the foundation of understanding what this equipment is doing.

We can let AI run as many algorithms and things in the background as it wants to and be as hands-off as possible, but how do we QA/QC the AI? How do we quantify that output to our customer if they say something went wrong? At that point, we don’t have a person to say, “Oh, yeah, I recognize between scan 100 and 200 that we had a little bit of an error, but it’s contained in just that spot.” If everything’s automated, people are just going to look at the numbers and the numbers can lie to you. You need the visual approach of getting into the TruSlice and let’s look at millimeter-thin slices and look for any misalignments or mismatches. Relying on AI for all of that is kind of scary to me because it’s unproven. And it seems to take the educated user out of the equation.

The curiosity factor of the user is key. One of the things in our certification is to understand what the technology does. What is laser scanning? How is using light as a method of data capture beneficial in this instance or not? Once you understand how the laser scanner works in all its most basic applications, now let’s get creative, let’s get curious. It’s that practical application that we would like to teach that curiosity factor of don’t just push the button for whatever the resolution is and only follow a set template; get creative with it.

I try different things out of curiosity when I’m in the field. If it works, awesome. And then I try to teach that moving forward to others so they can benefit from it as well.

What are you most excited about as you look to the future?

I’m really excited to see where the form factor in the technology is going to go. Things are getting smaller, lighter, a lot more portable, getting faster in terms of the data acquisition. I’m also excited about the application of reality capture and point clouds in industry. Some of my colleagues have been working on forestry and medical applications for laser scanning. So just the curiosity factor. What are people going to do with this technology that we’ve not thought of? And what kind of awesome, wow-factor deliverables are they going to be able to create?

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