Lidar Technology for Game of Thrones

Led by Vektra of Croatia, a visual effects team used Teledyne’s lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create a detailed 3D representation of the old city of Dubrovnik; the model for the fictional city of King’s Landing. They generated 3D point clouds in the set using various lidar technologies, including Teledyne Optech’s Maverick mobile lidar system and Polaris fixed terrestrial scanner. The lidar point clouds were then colourised with digital camera imagery and image fusion software.Read more....

Fake News: Mars Edition, Circa 1877

When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered at Mars through a powerful telescope in the late 1800s, he observed dark channels raked across its surface. These features became the key characteristics in his detailed maps of the planet, which fueled more than a decade of wild speculation regarding alien-built canals. Read more...

Automatically Extracted Buildings Data

Natural Resources Canada recently added a new data layer to the Federal Government Open Data portal to help with emergency management (particularly for flood and earthquake risk analysis).

The data layer consists of delineated building footprints with height and elevations automatically extracted from airborne LiDAR data, high-resolution optical imagery or other sources.Automatically Extracted Building Footprints Open Data for Eastern Canada

The data set available in vector format contains close to 1 million building footprints in several different geographies across the county.
https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/7a5cda52-c7df-427f-9ced-26f19a8a64d6