ICEYE
Move over, GPS. A more advanced mapping solution is going to change the way humans can see, anticipate, and navigate the world.
A new initiative called Project Orbion is creating a digital twin of earth by bringing together various technologies and companies in a collaboration that is promising to deliver a next-gen 3D mapping solution that will allow humans to see into places and in ways that we've never seen before -- especially in some of the most difficult situations and environments on the planet, where GPS can be of little use. But it will also have an impact for plenty of practical everyday needs as well.
Humanity relies heavily on GPS for a lot of functions of daily life -- from automobile navigation to public transit to ride sharing services to finding lost devices to the emergency response system to traffic management in cities to precision planting and machine navigation in agriculture, just to name a few.
However, as a technology, we're starting to run up against the limitations of GPS. One of its biggest limitations is that the data gets outdated very quickly.
"Project Orbian is about building this dynamic digital twin concept," said Michael Wollersheim, Director of Analytics for Iceye, one of the five partner companies in Project Orbian. "[With GPS], once you've got a slice of the data, it immediately starts going stale. So it's out of date the moment you capture it. Being able to update and refresh that as fast as you can in real-time from different sources is what this [initiative] is about."
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Just as GPS started as a US military technology before being commercialized and made broadly available to the public, the five partner companies that are coming together to create Project Orbian have grown out of the defense industry to create various next-gen mapping technologies. With Project Orbian, they are taking the first steps to bring their technologies together in meaningful ways to have a larger impact on public safety, disaster preparedness and recovery, transportation, agriculture, and many other spheres of life.
The group of five partner companies came together in San Francisco on Monday, September 8 to launch the Project Orbian initiative and take the first steps toward a combined standard for next-gen geospatial data. Each of the companies brings something different to the table.
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