On Tuesday at the ESRI UC I spent the majority of my day wandering through the many tables and displays set up in the exposition hall. At first I was overwhelmed by the size of the exhibition hall and the number of exhibitors but as I walked through the displays I became impressed with the number of ingenious ways that society makes use of GIS.
ESRI had a fantastic set up this year with their showcase featuring workstations set up to help with specific skill sets or applications regarding ArcGIS. Each station was staffed with knowledgeable assistants to help with your questions or comments. I stopped by the Training and Certification to inquire about ESRI’s new technical certification program. If you haven’t checked it out lately you should as large changes from their past instructor certification program have taken place.
Finally, I got the urge to enter drawings that many of the vendors were offering. One such company was offering a large remote controlled helicopter and I couldn’t resist. That entry led to a conversation with Bill Emison of Merrick & Company. Bill informed me that Merrick & Company were demonstrating Lidar processing software and gave me the tour of their product Merrick Advanced Remote Sensing Software (MARS).
All I can say is wow! The software processes millions of points super fast! After my whiplash settled down, Bill showed me some of the software’s capabilities in generating different GIS friendly formats, generating TIN surfaces, classification tools, and filtering abilities. Merrick & Company provides a free viewer and a 30 day evaluation of the full viewer. Definitely worth checking out if you make heavy use of Lidar data especially since it exports to so many usable formats.