The most impressive demo of the opening plenary session (from a geospatial perspective) hosted by Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, was given by GMJ Design, a firm that helps architects visualize their design work. Autodesk released information about their 3D model of London in early November but reading about it and seeing it are two different things. The 3D model, accurate to 1:500 scale, was captured using aerial images and ground control points...not LIDAR...which is the only thing I could see would have been able to capture that much data on such a large scale. The application that they promoted was using the model for urban planning, a major concern for Londoners. However, everyone in the audience is thinking about security and high threat concerns, and the ability to provide a very detailed viewshed analysis of any part of the city.

GMJ hopes to create these models for other cities. Their business model is to license the data, all of it or part of it, for a variety of applications. Remember, this is a digital model created in Autodesk 3ds Max so much of the data capture work is already done and can interoperate with other Autodesk software. My question is how many other cities would want to license this kind of 3D model data? I am thinking lots.