The industry is ready for this.

The first day of Geo Week has just ended, but it feels like we’re just getting started. With more than 3,000 registered attendees and a packed show floor, the buzz, traffic and excitment of the show is already evident.

The morning kicked off, as per tradition, with Product Previews. This year featured 19 companies showcasing new products and new workflows in quick 15-minute sessions. AEVEX Aerospace, Matterport, TopoDOT, Cintoo, Blue Marble Geographics, RIEGL, Bentley Systems, Trimble Inc., Hexagon Geosystems, SBG Systems, Nearmap, Phase One, 3Dsurvey, Esri, Prevu3D, Teledyne Geospatial and Pix4D took the stage, many making new announcements or launching new versions of software. 

“Technology projects are not really just technology projects, they are "change" projects.” - Claire Rutowski, Bentley Systems

The kickoff keynote, featuring thought leaders from Dodge Data & Analytics Bentley Systems, Environment Solutions | The Foth Companies, Skanska, National Institute of Building Sciences and HENSEL PHELPS asked some big questions about how to approach technology adoption, from trialing new software to considering what you - as a practitioner - really need, and whether that functionality is already in something that you might have. 

Then the doors to the Geo Week exhibit hall opened for the tech-minded attendees to explore the bigger-than-ever exhibit hall floor, featuring a mix of technologies across geospatial, reality capture, and building. The din of conversations carried all the way down the stairs to the registration desk as the exhibit hall brimmed with colleagues meeting up in person, sometimes for the first time. 

In the conference sessions, we heard about the latest industry updates for surveying and mapping, what’s new in bathymetric lidar, what the potential of AR/VR and mixed reality are for the industry, how sustainability should play a role in development, and how digital twins are being applied and scaled in new ways, and what challenges remain for reality capture. On the exhibit hall theatre, we heard about cutting-edge geospatial research, and hosted a standing-room-only presentation about how NeRFs relate to photogrammetry from Jonathan Stephens.

At the Academic Showcase poster session students and faculty shared innovative projects and case studies that applied lidar and other technologies to understand the world. From taking on multi-dimensional mapping projects with many different stakeholders to mapping underground spaces for flood risk, to identifying previously missed archeological features in the desert, to applying synthetic aperture radar to detect environmental hazards and more, the students enthusiastically shared their work. Several of the posters are in the running for an award to be presented at the award ceremony on Tuesday evening, but you’ll have to tune in tomorrow to find out who won. 

Ending the evening with a happy hour in the exhibit hall, we celebrate this coming back together. We are just as grateful for our attendees who have joined us from the early days of ILMF and SPAR 3D as we are for those who joined us for the first time this morning.We can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.