COVID-19 and its spiraling effects highlights the importance of accurate and timely geospatial information, and also accelerates the need for better understanding both indoor and outdoor spaces, and how people interact with them. The pandemic has also painfully demonstrated the need for industries to decentralize critical decision-making processes, feels San Gunawardana, CEO & Co-Founder of Enview, a pioneer in the scalable processing of 3D geospatial data.
The company today launched, Enview Explore, a first-of-its-kindweb application that leverages AI and cloud computing to automatically process 3D data at unprecedented speed and scale. Additionally, it also announced that Robert Cardillo, former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), has joined its Board of Directors. Cardillo, who served as the sixth director of the NGA from 2014 through 2019, is said to have transformed the Agency’s future value proposition through innovative partnerships with the growing commercial geospatial industry. The recent developments follow an oversubscribed round of funding in May as the company continues to experience growth and momentum in the market.
While underlining that geospatial insights are also highly relevant to respond to the historic Atlantic storm season, the historic wildfire events in the western US, and record setting heat waves, he adds, “Recent events demonstrate how important it is for society to understand the health and resiliency of manmade infrastructure and physical environment around our communities. High-frequency, large-scale 3D mapping can help protect people, communities, and infrastructure.”
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“Industries can no longer operate from centralized facilities; widely dispersed teams must share and action information in new ways, and tools like Enview are optimally positioned to empower this decision making,” says Gunawardana.
Ease of use
LiDAR and other 3D data hold tremendous value and provide unparalleled insight over 2D data sources. However, three-dimensional unstructured data, such as LiDAR, is painfully slow to analyze manually, and often requires an in-depth understanding of specialty software. Further, traditional LiDAR software is focused at the desktop level and requires manual input and processing. While current methods can take weeks or more to process data, Enview Explore utilizes a new and innovative approach that applies AI to 3D data, yielding significantly faster results than traditional LiDAR software, even providing actionable insights in minutes .
“What Enview brings to the market is fundamentally different from what exists in the market today. Our automated and scalable approach to data processing using AI is unique and works in conjunction with traditional GIS and CAD software,” points out Anthony Calamito, VP of Product, Enview.
The new product removes the need for outsourcing LiDAR to a third party by giving users the ability to perform classification, segmentation, terrain modeling, change detection, feature extraction, and intuitive visualization directly inside the application. “The new release represents a shift in the way Enview does business, exposing complex and advanced 3D data analysis in an easy-to-use SaaS application that does not require an expert to use,” adds Calamito.
At present, the company is focusing on a direct to consumer strategy and also ramping up discussions with a few strategic partners as we hope to offer third-party software integration in the future.
Calamito sees the use of this tool in traditional sectors such as energy and utilities. “However, we are currently seeing a lot of growth in National Security applications, and several use cases related to Humanitarian Assistance & Disaster Relief,” he points out while underlining that Enview will remain sensor and data agnostic, enabling users from many different industries to generate insights with our unique 3D machine learning. Over the next five years, it is expecting growth of 3D into new areas such as Smart Cities, Logistics Automation, and Autonomous Vehicles.
