As the team has been building out the Pixel8 platform we’ve leaned pretty heavily on the magic of commodity cameras to create awesome photogrammetry quickly. As much as we love GoPro and Insta360 cameras we are remote sensing practitioners at heart. We couldn’t sit back for too long and not…

I’ve read a few stories over the last year about the need for a back up to GPS. The New Yorker has highlighted the vulnerabilities of the current GPS system. Scientific American wrote about the lack of a ground based back up system, like eLoran, if GPS fails. Since we…

We’ve been chomping at the bit to open up Pixel8earth to the public. The challenge in launching a platform so computationally intensive is being able to stress test the infrastructure. To that end we’ve created an ambassador program where we will send 360 degree GoPro cameras to a dozen plus…

One of the challenges we’ve seen with OpenStreetMaps over the year is access to current remote imagery for creating and editing vectors. iD and JOSM are marvelous tools, but fueling them with up to date imagery can, at times, be challenging. For this post we’ll break down a few of…

Given the amazing success of OpenStreetMap in creating a free map of the world, you’d think it is a foregone conclusion that “open” is the future of mapping. Yet, the vast majority of the emerging augmented reality (AR) and autonomy maps are proprietary. In the AR space the proprietary aspect…

As we get closer to opening up Pixel8earth for more users we’ve been doing lots of dog-fooding. Everyone on the team has a 360 GoPro that we’ve been mapping our respective neighborhoods with. While we love the GoPro hardware and metadata (their telemetry is fabulous) the process of exporting videos…

One of the tools Pixel8 leverages to help georectify 3D point clouds from video/photos is open aerial LiDAR data like USGS’s 3DEP program. Aerial LiDAR is a fabulous open data reference, but for terrestrial applications like augmented reality and autonomy there are some glaring challenges. …

Introduction The goal for this blog post is to demonstrate how a detailed 3D point cloud can be built and accurately georectified to a real world spatial coordinate system for a large geographic area using commodity video. Specifically, highlighting the cost of production at scale. Before we get to the meat…

While our Boulder Mapping Experiment was a ton of fun — getting our friends together every weekend to take photos was a big ask. So, we’ve been experimenting with other imagery capture modalities that could scale up more quickly. One model we are particularly excited about is video. Not only…