3D Capture Crowdsourcing? Part 1

Introducing CrewSourcing by VTS 360capture

Part 1 of 3: How This All Started?

Crowdsourcing was a term coined by two editors of Wired magazine in 2006. The online dictionary Merriam-Webster defines it as: "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers." With the rise of sophisticated mobile devices, this became a popular way to collect data at a large scale using everyday consumers. Crowdsourcing also started the push for Big Data as the volume of data that needed to be ingested was much larger than typical beta programs and pilot studies in the past. The need to conduct structured experiments to obtain user feedback and collect market studies gave way to taking in mass amount of usage and location data all due to the proliferation of smartphones. One of the ways of crowdsourcing processing power, in recent memory, was by the SETI@HOME project. A program screensaver that started to process radio telescope data sent into deep space, on individual desktop computers creating a public super cluster. When it comes to maps and navigational data the way that Google Maps and Waze update their traffic conditions and routing is almost ubiquitous in use today and sources that from their millions of users.?

The ‘gig’ economy was popularized by ridesharing companies like Uber and food and package delivery companies like Doordash and Amazon (to some extent). This allowed the companies “workers” to pick up jobs when they fit their schedules and created a workforce that covered large geographies without any full-time employees.? The gig economy allowed people to freelance different services or to do those services as a side hustle in addition to their regular employment.?

In industrial and commercial segments, public crowdsourcing and gig workers aren’t attractive or feasible to use. Many of the areas are authorized only to employees and registered contractors and in many cases, multiple safety certifications must be held to be on those sites. Access restriction and the specialized knowledge and training in these industries continue to be the primary blocker for crowdsourced applications.?

Next Up: How Reality Capture Fits In?