Bentley Systems Signs Technology Agreement to Use LiDAR Data

Bentley signed a “continuous technology transfer” agreement with PointTools to be able to reference LiDAR point clouds to Bentley design data. Greg Bentley, the company’s CEO said that incorporating point clouds into the engineering design workflow was something that they have wanted to solve for a while but wanted to “do it right.” Bentley said that the hardware has improved greatly over the last ten years and that embedding the Vortex engine (Ss2) to reference and manage point clouds. “is a real breakthrough to reference point clouds into every workflow,” said Bentley. The Vortex engine from PointsTools will be embedded in the next version of MicroStation and ProjectWise SELECTseries 2 and delivery is scheduled for early Q1 2010. Aerial LiDAR data can be referenced to MicroStation drawings and workflows. This will not import point clouds into the drawing file but users can use point clouds as a reference for “snapping” to the point cloud data with an existing CAD drawing. PointTools is hardware neutral and Bentley saids the performance is excellent.