Hi Bill,
A few years ago Apple released a very high-end smartphone which has a LIDAR feature (iPhone 12 Pro). There are a few more models now which have it. I have heard of some people using this to create cave maps. There is much I do not understand.
Has anyone in the group taken the point cloud from an Apple LIDAR scan and turned it into a Therion cave map? If so, I am very interested in the details of the process.
OK, that's a mountain of a question. But yes they have been turned into maps, though I don't know about Therion. Firstly, iPhone can do LiDAR and photogrammetry at the same time, and you can put those together as a mesh with a tonne of post processing (it can even do colours because of the photogrammetry!). It can do some of this with its own software, but afaik, people prefer to use other software for the LiDAR processing. This can be used to create pretty accurate 3D views of caves. The loop closures look amazing, but it's hard to know whether the post processing is swallowing the errors. There is some work going on at the British Cave Surveying Group to get it working. Jono was pioneering this. https://3dcavesurveys.com https://www.youtube.com/@valaheritage-jonathanleste4205 At the moment, it has no centreline (unless he added that since I last looked, but it's not a trivial task), so that currently makes it quite incompatible with Therion. It is also worth noting that the iPhone has a 10 metre range. With passages larger than that, it just invents a ceiling or wall, even though there isn't one, which can really confuse any software that wants to use the result. And no LiDAR scanner copes well with water. Secondly, with point cloud data, Julian Todd has a completely different surveying package used to draw up surveys. You draw them in 3D, using a VR headset. It's called TunnelVR. Some people love the experience, it feels a lot like a computer game. But it is extremely different from Therion - an entire world away, and although it can export paper drawings, it is not as mature as Therion in that respect. Julian is very enthusiastic about this if you wanted to ask for a demo. There are others who do post processing of LiDAR data, using white spheres placed in the cave to link the scans to each other. These rely on very expensive hardware (but this was used as part of the project to survey all the world's largest chambers). I am very poor with names, and forget who was doing that. Perhaps someone else can remind me. In all of these cases, a centreline does not exist. You could of course use a scanner at every station, and import those as splays. That is more data than I would ever want to work with in Therion. It would be impossible to see the positions of things like boulders, pitch lips, ceiling steps, etc., because the entire thing would be a mass of splay lines, and would just be a grey blob. Though you could draw the walls to perfection! Those should be good places to get you started. Cheers, Tarquin