“When I tell people what I do, when I tell them I’m an engineer, nobody really cares,” quips Ted Knaak, president of Certainty3D. “But when you tell them you do mobile LiDAR, you take 3D images down the road at 50 miles per hour and you can extract all this CAD work, even your wife’s impressed sometimes.”

Speaking to his company’s TopoDot Users Conference, Knaak wasn’t just going for a laugh. In some ways, the gaming world and Hollywood movies have lent an air of excitement to at least a portion of what land surveyors and geospatial professionals do every day. With 3D imaging and virtual reality becoming buzz words, flashing a point cloud on a computer screen can get some attention. If it is married to photo images and has a look of reality, they’re riveted. Getting there isn’t easy or cheap, and it may not deliver what a client needs. But, done right, and done in conjunction with other technologies, mobile LiDAR is powerful.