by Roopinder Tara, CAD Insider
April 7, 2010 - WALTHAM, MA - I'm at Autodesk's AEC Technology Day and hearing about importing point clouds into CAD. What looks initially like a glowing red building is, upon closer examination, constructed of millions of points.
Jim Lynch, Autodesk VP of AEC, show
a how point clouds are utilized in 2011 prouducts
The scan was probably a result of an aerial LIDAR scan. It's literally a mess of points... millions, I'm sure. Seems like a lot, right? But compare that to our natural vision. As I look down from my flight home, I see a forest. If I were on the ground, I would see the tree, maybe the leaves. Could I pull out a microscope, I'd see the cells. Though I've gone through 6 or 7 orders of magnitude in scale, I have never lost continuity. I may have to go past nano scale, another 6 orders of magnitude before the image breaks up and I get lost among the molecules.
On the other hand, I only have to zoom in 10X -- just one order of magnitude -- before the point cloud model of the building deteriorates and what look like surfaces from far reveal themselves as simply points, leaving me lost in the cloud.
At the fast pace of technology, expect point clouds to be get denser and datasets to take gigabytes of space. Of course, our processing power, be it multi-core CPU or GPU, will also be keeping pace.
Today's hard drives are measured in terabytes. They should be ok -- for now.
Leonardo's
sketch? Nope. Squint... it's a bridge. We're going to have to a lot
better than this to even approximate nature.
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