Mr. Philipp Grimm, CEO of IGI (Integrated Geospatial Innovations)
Met with SuperMap at INTERGEO in 2022, IGI and SuperMap started to seek possibilities to combine each other's technological strength. In 2023, Mr. Philipp Grimm, CEO of IGI, was invited to participate the 6th International Workshop on GIS Technology and Application and the GISTC 2023 conference. On the second day of GISTC 2023, I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Philipp and discuss some topics including his experience at the GISTC conference and the interaction between IGI and SuperMap.
Speaking about the GISTC conference, Mr. Philipp said that he was impressed by the scale of the conference. "It's quite astonishing for me to see that so many people attending the conference. The venue is full of people. And I think the whole organization was very well."
Mr. Philipp delivered a report at the international forum titled "Demonstration and Applications of IGI Multisource 3D Data in SuperMap Platform with the IGI UrbanMapper". "Today I am just in the international forum and it's quite interesting. These image displays are quite amazing. And even in the international forum today, which is much smaller in terms of scale compared with the plenary conference yesterday, there's still so many people and it's still one of the largest I've ever seen, so these are really making a good impression here." In his report, he introduced IGI aerial camera systems and their advantages, and displayed a demo where IGI multisource 3D data was used in SuperMap GIS platform.
The demo adopts SuperMap iDesktop software. Based on SuperMap's 3D technology, it displays in three dimension the high-precision oblique photography data and underground pipeline data collected from a certain area in Germany. Using SuperMap's 3D particle special effects technology, a variety of realistic fireworks, rain and fog special effects are produced, making the display effect more vivid. In addition to visualization, IGI also uses the software and carries out visual domain analysis, sunshine rate analysis, urban building cross-section analysis, surface excavation analysis, etc. on the regional urban model. In terms of the underground 3D pipe network, the demo also shows the dynamic flow effect of it, and conduct analysis of underground pipe network bursts, facility networks, etc. in the region.
Mr. Philipp expressed how he felt when he saw the demo. "It's really amazing what you can do inside of SuperMap 3D and digital twin data because what we see so far is basically something really lacking for the end customer, for the government, for cities. It's the most important to have measurement possibilities and so on. In the last years we saw multiple different software packages and at first it was basically that we had oblique systems, only viewer for the oblique imagery. This changed I think in the last two to three years completely. So, these viewers are basically not there anymore because everything changed to the 3D and so visualization is more important."
This has also made me curious about how Mr. Philipp would think about the development of some new technologies which would affect the GIS industry. And he gave a very positive answer.
"You know, in the world wide, IT technologies develop a lot. We hear about many new things like AI large model or especially ChatGPT, that's really amazing. So do you think they will bring any threat to the GIS industry or GIS technology?"
"No, I don't see any threat, I just see may be more support because in the end everyone has been looking into this thing for a couple of years to derive out of the data more and more detailed segmentation automatically instead of having everything manually. So, in our area it's like that many of our customers have already been doing this since many years ago and I have seen also here and there available results where they can derive point cloud completely automatically for the computation because the customers also have all of the data. They're collecting millions of kilometers every year and therefore they can use these data and put them on the algorithms and test them so they have everything in their hand. They are all doing this mostly by themselves so they have their own programmer, and we as a company we are not so much involved in this.
We are more concentrating on hardware path. We can project basically sample data from a point cloud or also smaller images on DTM, so that you can see that the coverage and everything is already there and that everything is clear so that you save the money in the end because you don't have to re-fly. That is very important for our customers who are mainly then working with the data AI and ChatGPT and so on. I think this is a main driver that they want to have this automatically done. And this will push, I think that the whole GIS. This is going to be something like a standard."
"Yes, so they are kind of assistance or driver."
"So yeah, I think so. It's definitely being a good assistant in the end."
Though the application of automation may lead to less employees needed to do some basic works, but "they'll bring demands on new methods to do things, which will in the end create more jobs." Mr. Philipp said.
SuperMap International will soon go to Berlin for InterGEO this year, where IGI will also showcase. The demo displayed at the international forum at GISTC 2023 is a good demonstration of the combination of IGI data and SuperMap software, and also highlights the good foundation and broad space for future cooperation between the two companies. We look forward to more interaction between SuperMap and IGI, and hope to see practical demo of real cooperation cases by the two companies.
*More info added after INTERGEO 2023: SuperMap and IGI has reached a partnership at INTERGEO 2023. Look forward to that the two companies can bring more qualified products and services to customers in Germany and even the rest of the world.
