Hivemapper combines maps and videos reinventing the way you view drone footage
Very often big innovations come from small businesses. That’s the case of Hivemapper. The company offers an app that allows drone operators to view the height of objects around them and crowdsource potential threats as well as highlights so that they could avoid collisions or simply to find a cool place to fly (something like Waze but for drone pilots).
This week Hivemapper introduced a new technology called Flight View that changes the way you interact with drone footage by combining the videos and maps. The start-up takes your drone videos and creates out of it a 3D point cloud terrain model looking like a simplified version of what DataMapper or Pix4D does. The model itself might not be that precise but it’s purpose is different. It is not meant to be used for surveys but rather to interact with drone footage in a totally new way.
Rather than viewing the full 20 min video from your drone flight searching for a given location you can navigate through your footage on the map. This way you can immediately identify the location you’re searching for. Now you just click on it or zoom in and it will turn into a video you’ve captured. It’s really an amazing experience.
I can’t help the vision of global OpenStreetMap-like service with drone videos where you can zoom in to view a drone footage in parallel to satellite images or Google StreetView. For users it’s an amazing way to make sense out of hours of their drone footage. For Hivemapper it’s the most accurate and fresh data source about the height of buildings and objects that they can get for their database. Although today this is still a prototype I believe that we looking at the beginning of something big… Good job Hivemapper!