Homeless in Vancouver: Another camera car sighting? No, this one’s using LIDAR

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      Just the facts: At 9:30 a.m. a black vehicle with a red stripe and an apparent camera mast on its roof was seen turning right, from a westbound lane in the 1400 block of West Broadway, onto a northbound lane of Granville Street.

      The vehicle bore Alberta licence plates and was marked as belonging to an Alberta-based construction crane company called Mammoet.

      The masted rig fixed to the roof of the vehicle was clearly a variety of the Lynx mobile mapping system made by an Ontario-based company called Optech (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of California-based conglomerate Teledyne Technologies).

      Stanley Q. Woodvine

      Optech makes survey and mapping systems, including 360-degree cameras, but it specialized in Lidar, a mapping and range-finding technology that employs lasers.

      It’s not clear from the photos but part of the Optech unit on the roof may have been covered. The unusual Mammoet vehicle may, therefore, not have been collecting data but rather, simply been in transit.

      Vancouver tree canopy map from the 2014 Urban Forest Strategy report.—City of Vancouver

      (Above, a LIDAR map of Vancouver's tree canopy from the City of Vancouver's 2014 Urban Forest Strategy report.)

      In 2014 the City of Vancouver used Lidar for the first time to map tree canopy coverage for the Urban Forest Strategy report (clearly showing that the richest neighbourhoods have the most trees). Lidar is also a key technology behind self-driving cars.

      Stanley Q. Woodvine is a homeless resident of Vancouver who has worked in the past as an illustrator, graphic designer, and writer. Follow Stanley on Twitter at @sqwabb.

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