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In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out on a cruise ship anchored in San Diego Bay. For more than four days, the USS Bonhomme Richard burned, as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below, and firefighters aboard rushed to control the blaze. Before the embers cooled, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans were carried out to assess the extent of the damage and find out how the fire started.
But the investigation stalled, in part because of how difficult it is to transmit lidar scans.
Today’s leading cloud storage services – Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, and OneDrive – do not support the massive 3D files (sometimes several terabytes in size) used with lidar. The Marine unit in San Diego had to send thumb drives and Blu-ray discs, containing lidar scans of the charred Navy ship, to authorities across the country overnight.
This is what inspired US Army veteran Clark Yuan to launch it Stitch3Da browser-based platform that allows you to view, share, annotate, interact with and manage your large 3D files. Each file is stored as a “point cloud”: a collection of millions of separate points with x, y, and z coordinate values that represent a digital 3D scene. If Stitch3D existed, it might be easier to send scans of the USS Bonhomme Richard.
Stitch3D was showcased on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Yuan, who worked on lidar systems during his service, was helping the Navy improve 3D modeling systems at the time the disaster struck the USS Bonhomme Richard. This wasn’t the first time Yuan had seen the inefficiency of lidar file transfer. In his military days, Yuan remembers how some soldiers would run around with backups full of hard drives containing lidar scanners.
However, the US Army sees lidar surveys as critical in some situations, largely to prepare humans with accurate maps and equipment of the mission terrain.
Lidar creates 3D maps of the landscape by measuring how long it takes light rays to bounce off a solid surface. While aerial photos can only create 2D images, lidar can show height or depth as well. The technology can show where large holes are located on a battlefield, the height of a mountain, or the height of a building in a city. Advances in drone technology have made it easier to collect these lidar scans.
Stitch3D has received a $1.8 million grant from the Air Force to develop its technology safely, along with a $750,000 seed round raised from friends and family. The Air Force wants to use it to measure coastal erosion of air bases in Florida or assess damage to airfields after attacks.
However, Yuan sees Stitch3D as more than just a military application.
In a demo with TechCrunch, Yuan shared how you can use the Stitch3D platform to navigate around a detailed 3D map of the campus. The platform allows you to view 3D maps from different angles, measure the dimensions of buildings and geographic features, and annotate different areas with notes and colors.
Yuan also says Stitch3D can be used by anyone else who uses lidar, including industries like forestry, mining, architecture, land surveying, oil drilling, and more.
Augmented reality (AR) is another area that Stitch3D could one day break into, using the lidar sensor on the back of your phone (yes, your phone has one) to create interactive scans of objects or rooms. There’s a big uphill battle developing that right now, and they chose not to because the technology is so new, Yuan said. However, one day, he was able to see how Stitch3D’s point clouds could be used with augmented reality devices.
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