October 8, 2015 — Hexagon, a leading global provider of information technologies that drive productivity and quality across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications, recently was awarded the first- and second-place prizes in the Wichmann Innovations Award programme held during the INTERGEO conference and trade fair in Stuttgart, Germany.
The Wichmann Innovations Award is presented by publisher Wichmann Verlag, well known for its expertise in professional magazines and specialist books for geodesy and geomatics. Companies from around the globe submitted products and applications to participate in the competition. From hundreds of submissions, a jury of industry leaders selected 10 products and applications to receive votes from the general public. The main criteria for the award were innovation, user-friendliness and practicality.
The top honour went to the Leica Pegasus:Backpack, the industry’s first wearable reality-capture technology that combines five high-dynamic cameras and two LiDAR profilers within an ultra-light and ergonomic carbon fibre chassis. This mobile mapping solution creates a 3D view indoors or outdoors for engineering or professional documentation at the highest level of authority while using SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) to determine position in GNSS-denied areas. With a focus on fast and efficient capture, calibrated images and point clouds are quickly generated for applications as diverse as BIM 6D to industrial training and disaster analysis.
“The mobile mapping team has put a lot of hard work into understanding the needs of today’s professionals, and the Leica Pegasus:Backpack ensures they are not limited in how, where or when they collect their data,” said Stuart Woods, vice president of Leica Geosystems Geospatial Solutions Division. “With this achievement, the concept of mobile reality capture has been substantiated at the highest level and ushers in a new era in perception surveying and actionable mobile content.”
Second place was awarded to Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure’s Green GIS, featuring the patented ECW (Enhanced Compression Wavelet) data compression format and ERDAS APOLLO software. Through the use of Hexagon Geospatial technologies, Intergraph’s solution drastically reduces data volume and minimises storage demands and energy costs, leading to more efficient and environmentally friendly data centres.
“Software has a significant influence in terms of the enterprise carbon footprint. Our software-driven Green IT approach is absolutely new and pioneering, and effectively supplements previous environmental and climate protection efforts made by the information and communications technology sector,” said Maximilian Weber, senior vice president, Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure EMEA. “Our Green GIS can help lower carbon emissions of our customers’ IT processes.”
