This veteran couldn't share 3D scans of a burnt naval ship, so he created a startup that can
In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out onboard a naval ship docked in San Diego Bay.
In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out onboard a naval ship docked 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 rushed onboard to control the blaze. Before the embers had even cooled, lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) scans were taken to assess how bad the damage was and to figure out how the fire even started.
But the investigation was stalled, partially because of how hard it is to send lidar scans.
Today’s leading cloud storage services — Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, and OneDrive — don’t support the massive three dimensional files (sometimes, multiple terabytes in size) used with lidar technology. The naval unit in San Diego was forced to overnight thumb drives and Blu-ray discs, containing lidar scans of the charred naval ship, to authorities around the country.
That’s what inspired U.S. Army veteran Clark Yuan to launch Stitch3D, a browser-based platform that lets you view, share, annotate, interact with, and manage your large 3D files. Each file is stored as a “point cloud”: a collection of millions of discrete points with x, y, and z coordinate values that digitally represent a 3D scene. If Stitch3D existed, it may have been easier to send lidar scans of the USS Bonhomme Richard.
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