Good news, LiDAR users. Our friends at GeoCue Corporation have announced that they’re integrating support for the MrSID Generation 4 (MG4) format into their popular LP360 software applications. GeoCue is the parent company of QCoherent Software LLC, the makers of the LP360 product line.
 
This means that geospatial professionals using LP360, a LiDAR software extension for the Esri™ ArcGIS environment, will be able to efficiently input and decode LiDAR data that has been compressed using LizardTech’s LiDAR Compressor™ software. MG4, the latest version of the MrSID format, accommodates new GIS technologies by supporting multi- and hyperspectral imagery, LiDAR point cloud data, multiterabyte datasets, and other innovations.
 
GeoCue’s customers have asked them for tools to input, decode and view compressed LiDAR point clouds, says Lewis Graham, the company’s president and CTO, noting that now they’ll be able to do so easily.
 
We’re excited about the integration, too, because one of our objectives is to ensure that MrSID files can be used in the widest possible array of applications used in our industry. Now LP360 users will be able to handle compressed LiDAR datasets in ArcGIS, which adds to the number of applications that support MG4. (You can find a complete list under “Third Party Integrations” at http://www.lizardtech.com/products/lidar/.)

We’re pretty excited. Last week we announced that version 11.01 of Global Mapper supports LizardTech™ MrSID™ Generation 4 (MG4) among its many supported elevation formats. Mapmakers who use Global Mapper will now benefit from being able to load point clouds compressed using LizardTech Lidar Compressor™ into Global Mapper.

Earlier this week we were able to announce that Merrick & Company has similarly integrated MG4 support into its MARS^® (Merrick Advanced Remote Sensing) software application. Users of MARS 6.0, available now, can load MG4 files into MARS for visualizing and managing LiDAR terrain datasets.

How are they doing this? They’re using LizardTech’s MrSID Generation 4 Decode SDK, a free download.

Oh, and we should remind any ArcGIS 3D Analyst users that MG4 files are supported via LizardTech’s free MrSID Plug-in for ArcGIS 3D Analyst (http://www.lizardtech.com/download/dl_options.php?page=plugins), so you can work with MG4 files the same way you work with LAS files to create contours and surfaces.

The way we feel about all this is: The more the merrier.

This year’s ESRI conference was a satisfying mix of fun and overwhelming customer interest for our Lizards manning the LizardTech booth.

For customer interest, the release of LiDAR Compressor 1.0 garnered a steady stream of inquirers about the breakthrough of being able to compress huge quantities of LiDAR data in a MrSID file, and we gave away 500 trial DVDs.

For fun, we held another lizardy contest.

We invited users to submit a photo of their favorite plastic LizardTech lizard doing something interesting or posing in an exotic location, the favorite to be chosen by popular vote. The results were creative and often hilarious. Clark Siler of Pflugerville, Texas (shown above with Justyna Bednarski, LT’s marketing communications manager) won the contest and took home a handheld GPS for his trouble. Clark’s photo entry (below) won the most votes on our online voting page.

We’ve always been amazed at how much people enjoy the LizardTech plastic lizards we give away at trade shows. But they are loads of fun. Ryan Burley, northeast regional account manager, and Kelly Downs, director of sales, demonstrate just some of the possibilities.

Voting is over, obviously, but to see all the photos from the contest, visit our Flickr web page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizardtech/sets/72157619211930889/.

Glen Thompson and I were fortunate to attend the ESRI Developer’s Summit in Palm Springs last month. In addition to being a great excuse to get out of the rain here in Seattle, the Dev Summit provides a great opportunity to catch up with our friends from Redlands and see what’s new with ArcGIS.

Those who missed it can look over the presentations.

One way to think about an event like this is in terms of what’s cool and exciting and what’s getting the “business as usual” treatment. This year what’s cool and exciting is most definitely client-side web mapping. We’re talking Flex, Javascript and the newly released Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server. These were accompanied by cheering, contests, prizes and “Playful” (?) references to glitzy, “silverlighty” (get it?) applications.

There were no contests or prizes for the backend stuff on which Glen and I spent most of our time. Of particular note, GDAL is definitely on the rise here. GDAL is the open source project that (among other things) provides the ability to convert between raster formats. Principal maintainer Frank Warmerdam presented a technical session on “Custom Raster Format Support in ArcGIS through GDAL”. Guys, start thinking about migrating those Erdas Imagine / RDO extensions to GDAL. The writing is on the wall.

And, speaking of items that will eventually need migrating, I gave a short talk on “Implementing a Custom Image Server Raster Format.” It describes the technical architecture of the project and includes some server benchmarking work that we did in Seattle highlighting the impact of using Express Server with ArcGIS Image Server Extension.

ESRI is even hosting a video of the presentation.

Thanks, guys!

LizardTech will be at the ESRI Federal User Conference in Washington D.C., February 17-19. Look for us at Booth #321.

Says our senior product manager, Jon Skiffington, “We’re particularly excited to show off recently released version 7.0.2 of GeoExpress, which provides support for compressing CADRG/CIB files.” We expect this and other new capabilities to be of great interest to our defense and intelligence customers. If you’re attending, please stop by the booth and say hello.