Standardizing Excellence in Reality Capture via National LOA/Imagery Specifications

JOHN RUSSO: All right, good morning, everyone. I'm just working through a couple of technical things there with the screen flicker. Hopefully, it doesn't reoccur. This morning's session is called "Standardizing Excellence in Reality Capture via National LOA, Level of Accuracy, Imagery Specifications." And I think we were a contender for the longest session name, but we didn't make it.

All right, we'll do a quick overview of both of us and move forward. My name's John Russo. I am the president and CEO of architectural resource consultants, ARC. We're an architecture firm based out of Southern California specializing in building documentation services nationally. I'm also the founder and president of the US Institute of building documentation, the US IBD.

I've got degrees in both architecture and business administration. I'm a licensed architect in the state of California. And I've been practicing in the field of architecture for over 34 years, 22 of those specializing specifically in building documentation. I've been laser scanning since about 2007. And that is a picture of me being carried by my grandpa. And that little rattle thing they gave me, no one really realized what impact that might have on my future. Philip, you want to?

PHILIP LORENZO: Yeah, so hey everyone, my name is Philip. My background consists of working for a large scale contractor as a prject engineer and virtual design construction coordinator on some hospital projects around the California Bay Area. I got a degree in civil engineering. Then I ventured off into this software tech world with a big emphasis on reality captures. I was the a co-founder, CEO of a company called Rithm, which is a 3D scanning software for building code compliance, ASTM, ADA, stuff like that.

And then I transitioned a bit from scanning to 360 photography and videography with a new company called StructionSite, which digitizes-- basically, it's a Google Street View for construction that will analyze job site conditions. I'm also really highly involved with US IBD here, John, going beyond just making apps and really getting to best practices, really helping to push and standardize the way that we document and do reality capturing of buildings. That's going to be a big focus for today.

JOHN RUSSO: Great.

PHILIP LORENZO: I'm sorry about the flicker, though.

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah, the flicker's back. All right, well, today, we're talking about, again, excellence in standard, so throw a couple of quotes up on the screen for you as we go. A quick overview, we'll be going over what is the US Institute of Building Documentation. If you haven't heard of that, we'll talk a little bit about that, some of the standard documents that are available in reality capture through the US IBD, some education certification opportunities out there. We'll talk about a little bit on the imagery subcommittee work and a lot about imagery technologies, current and future, and then where is the US IBD heading.

PHILIP LORENZO: If you don't mind, I want to just poll the audience real quick just to see where their interest is. Can you raise your hand here if you do 3D scanning and you're here for the level of accuracy? OK, anyone here interested in the imagery side, the drones, 360 photos and videos? OK, it looks like it's a good mix.

JOHN RUSSO: Pretty mixed, good mix, yeah.

PHILIP LORENZO: Excellent.

JOHN RUSSO: All right, well, some of the things hopefully you'll walk away with today, some of the basics of reality capture, RFPs and RFQs , traditional and disruptive reality capture technologies, benefits of the LOA specification, and the benefits of the imagery, coming imagery specification.

So first off, some flicker. That is really annoying.

PHILIP LORENZO: Oh, it's going. Let's see. Let me just try to refresh this here.

JOHN RUSSO: I knew I should've brought my sock puppet.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah, I would do things on the screen, but we don't have light.

PHILIP LORENZO: Yeah, let's see here. How about if you just do like this? It should be fine. We don't have any animations or anything.

JOHN RUSSO: That's not big enough.

PHILIP LORENZO: There we go. That should be enough. Don't mind the stuff on the side.

JOHN RUSSO: Does that work for everyone? Hopefully, that does it. Let's see if this works. OK, is that what it is?

PHILIP LORENZO: Scroll up and down here.

JOHN RUSSO: Going for a new laptop. All right, so US IBD, first of all, how many people have heard of US IBD? OK, there's a good mix of you. Basically, US IBD is a nonprofit membership organization. It was founded in 2012. It's dedicated to supporting all stakeholders with an interest in building documentation, whether you're an owner, architect, engineer, contractor, service provider, surveyor, hardware, software guys. All these different stakeholder groups have, to some degree, an interest in documenting buildings. So the US IBD was founded to support and provide resources, education, standards, networking opportunities. It's a great organization, a lot of really fantastic people.

Where are we? Well, we haven't been around that long. But we're already in nine countries. Most recently, Argentina came on board. We've got members down there. And we've got some members in Australia recently. So we're expanding across the globe.

The distribution of our membership in the US looks something like this. So we've got members pretty much all across the states. We're run by a board of directors. And we have a committee structure. And we're not going to show it all to you. But our board of directors is comprised of an architect, an engineer, two surveyors, and a service provider. Boy, Philip, that's going to be tough.

All right, so US IBD annually has a symposium, which is a great place to go for networking, meeting other professionals. The past couple of years, we've been doing that in conjunction with the BIM forum, if you guys are familiar with that. You don't have to go to our symposium every year. A lot of people can't afford to go to all these shows. So what we're trying to do now is bring out what we're calling meetups, out closer to where everyone is in their locale.

So first quarter this year, we're going to have some meetups in Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, New York, as well as Tampa. And then we're going to have more as the year goes on. So if you're a member, if you're interested in coming to a meetup, you don't have to be a member. But if you're interested in hosting a meetup, get a hold of me. Because we're trying to expand these out further into the community.

It's a great place to go to make friends and have fun. This photo on the left is our board at one of our symposiums with a magician. And we're having a great time. I was, at least, until I realized that that was my wallet that was flaming on fire.

So there's a lot of resources and benefits to the US IBD. Our base camp collaboration tool, you can communicate with all the other members. There's our newsletter. You get a free subscription to LIDAR magazine as a member, cornerstone reports, and access to a lot of industry expertise.

I like this quote. "Consistency always leads to excellence. Whatever you do in life, be consistent." I'd like to maybe add to that standardized as well, to help with your consistency. So let's talk a little bit about standards documents in reality capture.

US IBD has some documents that are published or available on our website there at usibd.org in our store. Some are for purchase. Some are free for download. We've got a couple of bid documents. So if you're procuring building documentation reality capture services, you might be interested in our RFQ, our request for qualification, or our RFP document, request for proposal. These are templates. They're in Word format. So they're very easy to edit and customize per your specific needs.

But what's great about them is it helps to qualify your provider. It also helps to get you apples to apples bids on your jobs. Because a lot of times, proposals get put out there. And the bidders aren't really sure what they're bidding on. This helps you with that. So it should get you better bids.

There's a 3D imaging spec, which is in CSI's Page format. So it's designed to fit into a standard spec books as well as our flagship level of accuracy spec, the LOA, which is in version 2 right now. The LOA we'll talk a little bit more about, which one thing to say is we've got a version 3 coming out in the first quarter, which is a pretty major update.

The LOA spec, how many people downloaded that? Anyone? Yeah, we've got a few. So the LOA spec was developed really because there was no spec out there that we could find to specify accuracy on building documentation projects. There was the BIM forum's LOD spec, which I think a lot of people are familiar with and use extensively. But what was always missing was that accuracy spec. So this spec was developed in conjunction with that in a similar format. And they both standardized on the CSI uniformat, which classifies building elements and systems. So we thought it was important to be consistent with the other standards that are out there and adopt and help promote all of them.

One thing to note that we recognized with the Lo ace spec is it recognizes two forms of accuracy, one which we call the measured accuracy, and one which we call a represented accuracy. So the measured accuracy would be if, say for example, you do a laser scan of this room or of this building. And you take all those scans. You stitch them together however you do. At the end, you're going to end up with a point cloud. And depending on how you went about doing it, it's going to attain a certain level of accuracy. That would be what we refer to as the measured accuracy. So using this spec you can spec out how accurate you want that measured accuracy to be.

Now, you got to take that point cloud and do something with it, whether it's turn it into a BIM or create line work from it, you're going to introduce error. It's not going to be more perfect than the scan data itself. So we recognize that there needs to be a way to specify that level of accuracy as well. You can do one or the other. You don't have to do both. Some people just are interested in the represented accuracy. If your deliverable is a point cloud, you don't need the represented accuracy. Measured accuracy spec is all you need. So it's designed to be very flexible for big projects and small projects.

Another thing coming out shortly is our BIM subcommittee is producing this three part series for BIM best practices. It's going to have a white paper in there on the use of point cloud and BIM. It's also got a case study that talks about some things that went well and didn't go so well on a project that scanning was used on, as well as a guide on selecting a building documentation Professional

Let's talk a little bit about education and certifications. So in the building documentation world, there are no licensure requirements, right? If I want to design a building, maybe be licensed architect engineer-- if I'm on the land side of things, I'm going to do a boundary survey on a site. I need to be licensed to do that. But if I want to measure a building and represent it, I don't need to be licensed. Anyone here in this room can do it, experienced or not.

And so what happens a lot of times is people go to procure these services to document a building. And it may be the guy with the best marketing material gets the job. They may not be the most qualified. So what the US IBD is interested in doing, we're working on right now, is developing a certification that will result in a building documentation professional designation. So when you see that BDP after somebody's name, you'll know that they've met at least a basic level of understanding on all aspects of how to document a building properly. So be looking for that in the future.

One of our current certification programs is for our LOA specification. We're doing this in conjunction with CD BIM. That is actually worked into the CD BIM curriculum. But you can take some courses through CD BIM specifically on the level of accuracy spec. Those are available online. You pass those courses, you get a certificate saying you're certified in the LOA spec as well as a little widget to put on your email signature, if you like. And your name will get listed on the US IBD website as a certified professional.

Coming very soon, we're really excited about a new COBie certification with our new COBie subcommittee, which is led by Dr. Bill East who is the founder of COBie. So this is pretty exciting. We're working with the University of Florida for courses on that. They've got what they call the COBie Academy. So if you're interested in learning about COBie, there are courses available there. They are professional university level courses. So you will get a very thorough understanding of COBie going through those. When you come out, you'll be able to take the COBie certified professional exam. You pass it and you will be COBie certified.

I'll turn it over to Philip now to talk a little bit about imagery.

PHILIP LORENZO: All right, thanks, John.

JOHN RUSSO: Yep.

PHILIP LORENZO: So to summarize, John's talking about US IDB and also started to dive a bit into the level of accuracy for 3D scanning. For this next part, what I'm really talking about is elaborating on our imagery side. Right now, we've been focused a lot on DSLR cameras, 360 photos and videos. Soon, we want to definitely start adding some focus on the drone footage.

But right now, the main reason why we have this committee is that-- let's say the owner or someone has a contract spec for taking photos. Sometimes, you might just have the-- let's say that the superintendent's cousin come out with a camera phone and just randomly take photos. You might have some photos disorganized on some SD card somewhere. And so trying to reference back to those might not be as useful. Having some clarity to how often do things and just happen isn't some clear language so that your uniform-- you have uniformity in knowing what you're going to get is one of our big objectives.

So one big thing that's important with being able to standardize photo capture-- and I'm going to be focusing on the interior of buildings-- is rate of capture. Because how often you take photos really affects how useful it will be. You can take photos at certain milestones, for example say pre-wall close up before drywall gets closed so that you have the in-wall conditions, you have the backing, the locations of the piping, so that the downstream people won't go in there and bust through a pipe. Or say in-slab capture, which is a common thing that people talking, especially concrete companies for any potential damaging issues.

But if you're only capturing at various milestones and maybe you expect to go back and see what the job site condition looks like at a certain point before it got closed up or maybe in progress photos, if the photos is too old, it might not be useful for, say, a logistics planning and subcontractor coordination. So being able to, say, specify that site gets captured weekly so that you can see the progression for schedule updates for meetings with the owner, architect engineer to go over change order, stuff like that to maybe supplement job site visits, you might need to specify things that way. And each one requires, obviously, more effort and more resources. At least being clear on those expectations is important.

Another one is level of resolution. So this committee, we explore a lot of different cameras and how much resolution they can give at a certain distance from the object of interest. I'll describe that in a bit. At the last symposium or at the last BIM forum if any of you were there, we were doing a lot of tests on cameras. And so we got a lot of-- a bunch of cameras-- a lot of it the popular ones are the top ones are in the industry, tested it in the office, tested it in the field to see which one allows you to see certain building elements.

So being able to select certain equipment is important or considering what the end deliverable is going to be. There's big differences in pixel quality. So you might have like a 12 K camera on the left, and then maybe a 5.7 K camera on the right. And there's a big difference in how much you can zoom in and really see the clarity of things. So it's not just a like-- you might have someone just go up and take a bunch of photos. But maybe, what you really needed was just not in there. Maybe the photo capture was just too sparse. So the really important things that need to be up you haven't seen or weren't captured. And that could be a concern.

It's also not just about pixels. It's not about resolution. It's also-- if anyone here is into photography, it's also about really the ability to handle different lighting conditions and the quality of those pixels, which allows you to see certain things on the job site. On the left and right side, you have two cameras that are very similar in pixel count. But you can see a vast difference in how they handle light. And it makes it makes a world of difference in being able to tell what's there.

So yeah, zooming, number of pixels and then quality pixels are our two biggest things. And what we're trying to build in imagery with the US IBD is taking an approach that is based on the CSI uniformat in terms of what you want to be able to capture. And based on what you need to capture, some things are not that important. Some things are, especially let's say for maintenance staff down the line. And so that's why it's important to consider, maybe based on the deliverable, what tool you might use. Because it'll affect how you use it. Let's say if you're using a camera with low resolution, then you just have to take a lot more setups.

Another thing that we're-- another part of the standard that we're creating for images is accuracy of proximity. So we have different levels, four different levels. Level 0 is a common one where you just take a bunch of photos. Maybe you know what project it's part of, maybe not. But you don't necessarily know who took it. You don't know where it's located at all. You might just have the date from the actual raw data of the photo. So just being organized on a project level is level 0.

Level 1 is, OK, now you're getting really serious. Because you're organizing it and folders now. That's some advanced stuff for a lot of projects, where you get level 1, level 2, level 3. You might even have different phases of construction diagrams. Or might tag them, for example.

Level 2 is when you start to actually have some symbolic representation on a drawing. So there's a lot of software out there right now, a lot of mainstream and really popular ones that just allow you to just add a photo and put it on a location. You might not necessarily know what direction you're facing. But what's common is that people-- let's say you want to add a photo to the north side of the room. You just plot a pin close to the north side. That's good enough for a lot of these cases, level 2.

Level 3 is if you really want to get much more accurate in terms of where things were captured. And let's say you also want to know the orientation of things. Because let's say if you wanted to streamline processes in comparing photos across time in terms of being able to say compare to a model roughly, some of those workflows could benefit from the added level of accuracy, level of proximity of where it truly is on the job site.

And then lastly, level 4 is the really high end. Let's say you're going to be colorizing point clouds. You want to potentially dimension from it. Because if you know the exact location of something, let's say down to like a 3D laser scanning level, if you can actually perform mathematical calculations to actually measure stuff, then that's where level 4 comes in. And there could be other reasons for that, maybe just for higher end applications.

So with these two things-- so you have the level of resolution and then in terms of what-- and these are all objective-based, based on your objectives. Level resolution and accuracy of pose, I think we're going back and forth on what we want to call it. It could be level of proximity or something like that. But those two things are part of the standard that we're working on. If anyone here is interested in being a part of this or learning more about it, then hit us at the end.

Another big thing with imagery for us is the interoperability. So with a lot of data, there is-- with all of these softwares-- there's a lot of software coming out in industry that captures photos or just documents your building to streamline that process-- ensuring that your data can be transferred from one platform to the next is really important. Because what if in five to 10 years-- what if what if a company goes under? What if it gets acquired by another big entity that's a competitor to another one and they'll close off, as I'm sure you've seen that happen a couple of times?

Yeah, so being able to ensure that your data and the metadata that's in there is portable to a certain way, that really ensures data lifecycle. You might capture stuff at the beginning and you or your teams might spend a lot of time and resources collecting these photos day after day, week after week over the course of years. And to ensure that, let's say, there aren't necessarily software platform as or service fighters that might restrict you owning your own data, or at least at least have some way to transition data I think is important.

Who owns a data is really up to the software vendors and the owners and all that. But at least having a standard for how data should be transferred and complying with that, let's say if you're going to look for a solution that-- you're going to be confident that it's going to be, at the end of day, say be able to be able to ask to export it to a PDF format instead of having to be in a closed system is important for a lot of people.

Because it really also fosters innovation, if you think about it. A lot of software companies, for example, they're incentivized by revenue, profit, and returning money back to investors or stockholders. So there is a strong incentive to keep data closed and not shared, which actually it does help their business. Because it makes their platform more important. But it could be at the expense of the end user, the expense of the person capturing it.

Because what if another company comes along who is super innovative? Maybe they're super focused on the facility side. Maybe they have some crazy new workflows here or there. Instead of having to start capturing stuff from scratch, being to ensure that your transition is important. So allowing for innovation to continue to happen is a big part of the interoperability.

I'll also describe another committee that we have in US IBD which is related to technology. I used to be the chair of the committee before transitioning to imagery. So yeah, there's a lot of different avenues of US IBD. This was a pretty exciting one where we explored technologies that were available today, just getting a good sense of, snapshot, of where people are, how they're using technology, and also what may be potentially happening in the future that could disrupt the way that we document our buildings.

One thing that we like to do with the tech committee is release these cornerstone reports. These are big surveys that get sent out to a lot of industry professionals just to see how much adoption has been happening in, say, 3D scanning, the type of deliverables they give, technologies they use. And then we actually do it again every year to analyze trends and see how things are going.

One thing we've been noticing, this was a little bit outdated. But it still applies today. The rate of adoption of reality capture, we have BIM. We're over here in the late majority stage. It's a standard these days. If you're not doing BIM, then you're not really in with best practices, at least for the most part. Reality capture is still in its early majority phase. People are still capturing it. And we're monitoring this transition over time, which is why it makes sense to start having these standards established so that there's some consistency and we can innovate.

We're also seeing-- starting to see-- here's this one snapshot that we can get. And what US IBD likes to analyze is to gather data on, say, how much-- what is the adoption rate of 360 cameras in industry? You see a lot of people might have one or two. You have some people that are newcomers. And then you have people that might quickly realize, we need more than 20 of them now. We need to get it everywhere. It's like an iPad. It's no longer a toy. It's a standardized thing.

So there's just some interesting insights that we like to uncover. And it's really-- the information is not really coming from us as much as it's really just coming from the industry. It's just a snapshot of everyone here and people who do this on a daily basis. So all we're doing is unlocking that information, giving a little bit of our analysis on it, but trying to do it in a way that's as unbiased as possible since we're a non-profit organization.

All right, thanks for that.

JOHN RUSSO: All right, very good, thanks Philip. All right, just a brief snippet on some of the future of US IBD, where we're going with a few things, give you a look ahead. Well, we've got some new committees coming online this coming year. One of them we're pretty excited about, the ARVR committee. I think we all see the coming of this. It's fast approaching where there's stuff out here in the exhibit hall that's pretty exciting to see. And I think it's going to unlock all kinds of possibilities with regarding building documentation. And there's things that we can't even imagine yet that it's going to be-- we're going to be immersed in with this technology.

So if you're interested in getting involved in this, with some very early adopters, this committee might be a really good place for you to go to learn. And if you're interested in adopting the technology and you don't know a lot about it, that's OK. These committees figure things out. So if you're struggling with where do I begin with this, get involved this committee. You're going to learn from other people that are at your level and advanced. And it's amazing, I think, what's going to come out of this.

We also just started a new subcommittee for laser scanning hardware specifications. And this is a little frustrating. Because there's a lot of different scanners, a lot of different scan heads on the market. And they all do different things. But the manufacturers, if you look at their spec sheets on what their capabilities are, they're all over the board. They don't use the same terminology. They don't state the same resolutions. They don't state the distance for the accuracy they're capturing. Nothing's consistent.

So if you're trying to evaluate these instruments and trying to figure out which one might be best for your needs, it's really difficult. And I don't know about you. I mean, a lot of times, it's just like, OK, my buddy uses this one. He says good things about it. And I might go with that. Or I like the price. Or I like the way it looks. It gets down to inconsequential things. So this committee is going to try and help standardize those things, those specs, so we can make more informed decisions.

One of the things that the US IBD has been doing to help with that as well that will be more work in this subcommittee is actually pretty valuable, I think. At a recent symposium, we had a session, what we called a scanner shootout. And basically, what we did-- the whole intent of this was let's not involve the manufacturers. Because there's usually a bias there. Let's just on our own gather all the different types of scanners we can.

These are scanners that are in service. They're properly calibrated. But let's put them in an environment. And let's get some materials that we commonly capture with these. And let's scan them in a consistent manner. And let's see what we get. Let's see what the data really looks like, so we can decide for ourselves what instrument is going to be best for our needs.

So we created these material boards over here with different materials that we commonly encounter. We set up in our shop a tripod that was stationary. And we put the boards out at different locations and different angles and different distances. Those remained fixed. All that changed was the scan head. So I've got a few slides of some of the data that we collected. So let me back up for a second.

This board C here was for ceiling and wall tile. And that's the data we're going to look at right now. Oops, where did it go? It's not advancing. There we go. OK, thanks. Here is one scanner. So you can see a face view of the board that got scanned, the data there. And these are obviously just images, a little more difficult to analyze just an image then going into the raw data. But we plan on making the raw data available as well.

The next image over is a profile section we cut through this part of the board. And so you can start to see what the different materials are doing, reflectivity, how it affects the data capture. And then that last image over is just a zoomed in version of a piece of that profile. And this is where it gets interesting. I'm going to just cycle through some of the different scan data. It's all overlaid, so you can see how it changes.

Here's another scanner. And you can see how that data changes. We've got some black areas here. It was having some trouble capturing whatever that material was. This scanner, it captured the data the other one was having trouble with, but was having trouble up there. So what is it that you're scanning? Look at the profile images. The point density is a lot different.

Here's a Surphaser, same thing. So being able to compare this data is really important. I own different scanners. I have a couple of different manufacturers we use constantly. We like them. They're very suitable for the majority of our work. But every so often, I'll get a project that comes up that's unique. Now, maybe it's like a food processing plant or something. We don't do a lot of those. And it's got a lot of stainless steel in it.

So I'm really concerned because of the reflectivity. How's that data capture going to go? Are my scanners the right instruments for that project? Well, having access to data like this, I can go in and I can look and see and find stainless steel material and what is it dealing with the different scanners. I don't have to depend on going to the manufacturer, hey, how does your scanner do with stainless steel? And I've got to have 20 conversations. I can analyze for myself now and make my own decisions what's best.

This isn't meant to describe what's the best scanner on the market. All these scanners have tremendous capabilities and have their strengths and weaknesses. All this is meant to do is give you the ability to decide for yourself what's best for your particular situation. And that's in line with the philosophy of the US IBD.

So standardizing excellence in reality capture, again another quote-- "You don't have to be great to start. But you have to start to be great." I like that. So where do you start? Well, I'm going to ask you to get involved in US IBD if you aren't. Because it's a great organization. You can go and learn more at our website. We just published a new website. There is a member portal. So if you do decide to become a member, you'll get access to even more resources than are what available on the public side. But it's a tremendous number of really, really good professionals in the industry, a lot of expertise. You'll get access to all kinds of great information and hopefully contribute as well. Because that's how we're going to advance as an industry.

So at this point, I think we want to open it up to questions and see what you guys think. Skylar?

AUDIENCE: Do you plan on doing a [INAUDIBLE]?

JOHN RUSSO: We did dozens of scanners. We have so much data. It's going to be very time consuming to go through and make it all presentable. But we're--

AUDIENCE: Is that a recent thing?

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE: I'm very interested to see the results.

JOHN RUSSO: It's pretty exciting. Over here?

AUDIENCE: On those 360 cameras, I'm assuming you're [INAUDIBLE]. What would you do at a price point-- say $1,000-- what would your solution be?

PHILIP LORENZO: So regardless of what software you use for that, I'm going to reply with another question. Would your objective be really high resolution cameras or speed of capture? I guess that would be-- there's a big difference there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PHILIP LORENZO: Not necessarily, yeah. So you might have some-- right now, we're doing-- you saw earlier we had a photo shoot camera shoot out, which is really good. But there's also a new generation of 360 cameras that are really good video. They're maybe not that good at photos. But video, for example, is typically not as high resolution. But with video because it's so fast, you can just walk close to it. And then you've captured it.

AUDIENCE: Because on the 360s, my sampling distance has to be pretty frequent.

PHILIP LORENZO: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And it'll capture the resolution and quality.

PHILIP LORENZO: Right, yeah.

AUDIENCE: And what camera system can you recommend, based upon your testing, can I use to diminish that frequency of capture?

PHILIP LORENZO: So frequency and speed, I think, would be better addressed with-- photography has a really hard limit. Because you have to stop. So what we're all standardizing on is imagery as a whole also encompasses videography. So there's a lot of money being invested in VR right now. So we're starting to see a lot of really good high quality 360 video cameras. If frequency is a big concern, I would recommend, say, a Garmin Verb is a really good one. It's a bit lower, or cameras like that. Because they have-- some of the really high end 360 video cameras are approaching the resolution of photos, photolike data. So that would be--

JOHN RUSSO: So you're suggesting because of the frequency use video not still, so that you can get a lot of those captures instead of boink, boink, boink.

PHILIP LORENZO: It's not about what camera it is. Because actually, literally in a month or two, there's probably going to be a couple more cameras that are going to be better than that. It's a very fast growing industry. It's different from scanners. I think scanners you see them come out with a release maybe every two years, three years. With photos, it's literally every year they seem to double in quality and go in half in cost. So I would focus more on the concept of fast capture versus just still, really high-high resolution capture, but less frequency. Think about it that way.

JOHN RUSSO: Sorry, I'll get you next.

AUDIENCE: What's the membership fee?

JOHN RUSSO: Right now, our membership is $200 a year. There is a discount now through the end of the year. So I think it's 20% off if you sign up before the end of the year. We're having a promotion at the end of the year. Next year, we are expecting to raise our membership dues rates. So if you are interested in getting in, now is the right time before the end of the year. Back there?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: In Germany, there are the same issues in a few respects. And then [INAUDIBLE].

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN RUSSO: Yeah, no, those are great suggestions. And there's so much you can do when you start getting into doing these types of testing and things.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN RUSSO: We would love that, yeah absolutely. Yeah, see me afterwards. Anyone else? Yeah?

AUDIENCE: There's an ANSI standard [INAUDIBLE]. It has to do with [INAUDIBLE]. I saw a slide earlier in your presentation where there was a minimum and a maximum.

JOHN RUSSO: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And then you were taking the average of the two to draw the lines, typically. Have you looked into other standards that are out there, like the ones that [INAUDIBLE]?

JOHN RUSSO: I'd be interested in looking closer at that. Our LOA committee is looking at different standards. And we're always interested in either, first, not trying to reinvent the wheel, but adopt things that are already working and in place and/or incorporating them. We've done that with our LOA spec, with other standards that are out there. The LOA spec originally came from-- the different levels of accuracy that we had came from a standard out of Europe, the DIN standard. And those ranges that we use were adopted from that. So I would be very interested in looking at that closer.

Anyone else? Great, well, I think that'll conclude our session everyone. Thank you for coming. We appreciate it.

[APPLAUSE]