Laser scanning has come a long way since I interviewed Ben Kacyra—the cofounder of Cyra Technologies, which became Leica HDS—back in 1999. The first magazine cover about scanning came from Hollywood as an article about the use of scanning in the movie Starship Troopers. From there we began seeing articles about highway projects, most notably bridges.

Since then, scanning has become much more mainstream as we have witnessed the technology being used on an incredible variety of projects, from extremely close-range to "in the air." And as we have seen with the most recent downturn, a diversification of not only the types of work we do—but also the technologies employed—is the only way to survive uncertain economic times.

Last week, the Appalachian Chapter of the Maryland Society of Surveyors presented a scanning seminar (with CEU credit) right here in my home town. Hosted by Caron East, a Maryland Topcon dealer, and Carlson Software, the all-day seminar presented A-Z basics. The photo shows Chris Robson from Caron East, and after gathering two scans Scott Griffin from Carlson demonstrated processing the collected data into an AutoCAD drawing.

I stopped by to check it out and was impressed not only by the breadth and detail of the presentation, but also by the age of the participants. Conventional wisdom has held that older surveyors are not interested in new-fangled technology, but based on what I saw, this is not the case. If you care to see our photos of the event, we have posted them to our flickr account HERE.

**All text and photos above from American Surveyor