Hexagon Takes Top Honors in the Wichmann Innovations Award

The new Leica Geosystems Pegasus backpack wearable mobile mapping solution. (Leica Geosystems AG, Switzerland, 2015)

The top Wichmann Innovations Award has been given to the Leica Geosystems Pegasus:Backpack, a wearable reality-capture technology that combines five high-dynamic cameras and two lidar profilers within an ultra-light and ergonomic carbon-fiber chassis. Leica Geosystems is a brand of Hexagon.

Companies from around the globe submitted products and applications to participate in the awards, which were presented by publisher Wichmann Verlag at the INTERGEO trade show, held in Germany in September. From hundreds of submissions, a jury of industry leaders selected 10 products and applications to receive votes from the general public. The main criteria for the awards were innovation, user-friendliness and practicality. Wichmann Verlag is known for its expertise in professional magazines and specialist books for geodesy and geomatics.

The Pegasus:Backpack is a mobile mapping solution that creates a 3D view indoors or outdoors for engineering or professional documentation at the highest level of authority while using SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) to determine position in GNSS-denied areas. With a focus on fast and efficient capture, calibrated images and point clouds are quickly generated for applications as diverse as BIM 6D to industrial training and disaster analysis, Leica said.

“The mobile mapping team has put a lot of hard work into understanding the needs of today’s professionals, and the Leica Pegasus:Backpack ensures they are not limited in how, where or when they collect their data,” said Stuart Woods, vice president of Leica Geosystems Geospatial Solutions Division. “With this achievement, the concept of mobile reality capture has been substantiated at the highest level and ushers in a new era in perception surveying and actionable mobile content.”

Watch a video about the backpack taken at INTERGEO:

Second place was awarded to Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure’s Green GIS, featuring the patented ECW (Enhanced Compression Wavelet) data compression format and ERDAS APOLLO software. Through the use of Hexagon Geospatial technologies, Intergraph’s solution drastically reduces data volume and minimizes storage demands and energy costs, leading to more efficient and environmentally friendly data centers.

“Software has a significant influence in terms of the enterprise carbon footprint. Our software-driven Green IT approach is absolutely new and pioneering, and effectively supplements previous environmental and climate protection efforts made by the information and communications technology sector,” said Maximilian Weber, senior vice president, Intergraph Security, Government & Infrastructure EMEA. “Our Green GIS can help lower carbon emissions of our customers’ IT processes.”