LiDAR – Changing the Future of Mapping

The LiDAR technology has been around for some time, now – it’s had various military, scientific and geological applications since the late 1990s. However. As with most military technologies, it’s going mainstream, making civilian life easier and better. Remember the mobile phone? That used to be a field communications device in the first Gulf War. Light Detection And Ranging was used in similar circumstances – before being unleashed on the public consciousness in the form of extremely accurate and wide ranging mapping techniques.

So. What is LiDAR – and what’s the difference between it and its first cousin, RaDAR? To answer the second question first: not much. There’s little difference between Light Detection And Ranging and Radio Detection And Ranging – except that the first uses light and the second uses radio frequencies. This pretty much answers our first question too. What is Light Detection And Ranging? It’s a way of creating a three dimensional image of terrain and topography by firing constant beams of light wave frequency at stuff and recording how it comes back.

The major advantage LiDAR has (in terms of mapping, at any rate) over other forms of resonance imaging (which is all these technologies are – they use “echoes” of one sort or another to create images based on feedback data), is that it seems to return “pure” results – i.e. images of genuine ground topography only. What that means is this: when a person pings a bunch of light waves at the ground, the image he or she gets back is an accurate depiction of the actual ground surface, rather than the tree tops, or house roofs, above it. Traditionally, that’s called “clouding” or “interference” – LiDAR just cuts straight through it. The absence of clouding in a LiDAR image allows cartographers to get a far more accurate picture of the way the land really lays. And that, in turn, means big bonuses for geographers or construction companies – anyone, in other words, who needs to know what the surface of an area really looks like. Light Detection And Ranging cuts through all the nonsense and returns proper topographical images – allowing very accurate decisions about elevation and declension to be made, along with much better predictions about land fertility, rock grading, mineral seaming, and so on.

In the public domain, LiDAR is still a fairly new beast: it’s just starting to be used to develop more everyday maps. That’s worked very well in conjunction with recent trends for Internet mapping projects. The technological world is suddenly opening its eyes to the structure of the planet that supports it, bringing the globalising trends of the Internet full circle – now, with all these interactive maps and stupendously ambitious UK mapping projects under way, users of the Net are really starting to engage with their geographical location: their world.

Without LiDAR, this engagement, this technology, wouldn’t be possible. Once again, the science of military applications spills over into the normal world. The only thing we use these days that wasn’t originally designed for the army (even strong glue was, for heaven’s sake), is the Internet itself. That was designed for schools and universities. And with the new mapping technology out at the forefront of its interactive face, it’s making every normal day a school day – for all of us.