Hexagon recently announced the introduction of HxDR, a new cloud-based digital reality management and visualization platform. HxDR combines advanced visualization technologies, AI, and machine learning processes from Hexagon entities like Luciad, Technodigit, Xalt Visualization, and Melown Technologies, along with professional airborne reality capture from the HxGN Content Program, bringing HxDR together as an advanced yet easy-to-use platform designed for dimensionally accurate and immersive 3D visualization.
At Hexagon’s Geospatial division, we’re proud to deliver a key contribution to HxDR with our LuciadRIA and LuciadFusion technology. LuciadRIA is used at the front-end and powers all the visuals, while LuciadFusion is used at the back end for data streaming and processing.
With the Luciad software in HxDR, airborne imagery and laser scans, indoor and outdoor terrestrial scan data, and mobile mapping data can be seamlessly combined to create an accurate digital representation of the real world.
It all started with this demonstration:
When representatives from Leica Geosystems saw it, they were instantly convinced that LuciadRIA would be the perfect visualization interface for HxDR. The video was shown in multiple keynotes at HxGN LIVE 2018 in Las Vegas and was an instant success! In a way this video was visionary, since it shows the foundations of what would later become the “HxDR Supermesh” — the combination of multiple types of 3D datasets, such as point clouds, laser scans, drone scans, and 3D models.
For one year, a dedicated development team from our Leuven, Belgium, office has been working full time to bring all requested LuciadRIA and LuciadFusion capabilities into HxDR. It goes without saying that we’re thrilled with the result.
While our involvement was key to the success of HxDR, HxDR has allowed us in return to further refine our own technology and carefully tune it to provide an optimal experience for the HxDR platform. We are now second to none in the Smart Digital Reality domain. The visuals in LuciadRIA have been taken to the next level with shadowing and occlusion, depth of field, and on-the-fly recoloring and deliver a smooth performance on petabytes of data.
Furthermore, the upcoming LuciadRIA releases in 2020 will add support for panoramic imagery and will take interactivity to the next level: place your CAD models interactively, altering the original mesh on the fly; make smooth camera tours; and peek inside your models with slicing and mesh operations.
Optimized 3D data streaming will be added to LuciadFusion 2020 with a new 3D tiles processing engine that turns BIM, CAD, and large 3D datasets into streamable 3D tiles. It solves many issues with the suboptimal 3D data that is now often found in the field.
HxDR has clearly accelerated the development of LuciadRIA and LuciadFusion and vice versa. This results in untapped potential for new Smart City and Smart Site applications, especially if you combine the digital reality features with the existing benefits of the Luciad Portfolio, such as real-time data, time slicing, and domain-specific data.
While waiting for the 2020.0 Luciad Portfolio release in March, have a closer look at this feature on the 2019.0 release.
