In the summer of 2020, a fire broke out on a Navy ship docked in San Diego Bay. For more than four days, the aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard was in flames as helicopters dropped buckets of water from above, boats spewed water from below and firefighters rushed aboard to extinguish the blaze. Before the embers cooled, lidar (light detection and ranging) scans were taken to assess the extent of the damage and determine how the fire started.
However, the investigation stalled because it was extremely difficult to send lidar scans.
Current major cloud storage services (Google Drive, DropBox, iCloud, OneDrive) do not support the large three-dimensional files (sometimes several terabytes in size) used in LIDAR technology. A Navy unit in San Diego was forced overnight to turn over thumb drives and Blu-ray discs containing lidar scans of charred Navy ships to authorities across the country.
This is what inspired U.S. Army veteran Clark Yuan to start Stitch3D. Stitch3D is a browser-based platform that allows you to view, share, annotate, interact with, and manage large 3D files. Each file is saved as a “point cloud”. It is a collection of millions of discrete points with x, y, and z coordinate values that digitally represent a 3D scene. If Stitch3D existed, it might have been easy to send a LIDAR scan of the USS Bonhomme Richard.
Stitch3D was on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Yuan worked on LIDAR systems during his service and was helping improve the Navy's 3D modeling system around the time of the USS Bonhomme Richard disaster. This wasn't the first time Yuan noticed the inefficiency of transmitting lidar files. Yuan remembers that during his time in the Army, some soldiers would run around with backups full of hard drives containing lidar scans.
However, the U.S. military believes lidar scanning is important in some situations, primarily to prepare humans with accurate maps and equipment for mission terrain.
Lidar creates a 3D mapping of a landscape by measuring the time it takes for light rays to reflect off solid surfaces. Aerial photography can only create 2D pictures, but LIDAR can also display height and depth. This technology can show where large holes are on the battlefield, the increase in mountain elevation, and the height of buildings in cities. Advances in drone technology have made collecting these LIDAR scans much easier.
Source: Stitch3D
Stitch3D secured a $1.8 million grant from the Air Force to develop the technology in a safe manner, as well as a $750,000 pre-seed round raised from friends and family. The Air Force hopes to use it to measure coastal erosion at an air base in Florida and assess damage to airfields after attacks.
But Yuan sees Stitch3D as more than just a military application.
In a TechCrunch demo, Yuan shared how he used Stitch3D's platform to navigate through a detailed 3D map of a college campus. The platform allows you to view 3D maps from different angles, measure the dimensions of buildings and geographic features, and annotate different areas with notes and colors.
Source: Stitch3d
Yuan also said Stitch3D could be used by anyone else who uses lidar, including industries such as forestry, mining, construction, land surveying and oil drilling.
Augmented reality (AR) is another space that Stitch3D could someday invade. It uses the LIDAR sensor on the back of your phone (yes, phones have sensors) to create interactive scans of objects and rooms. Yuan said that there are currently major uphill battles in its development and that the technology is so young that it has chosen not to develop it. But one day I realized how Stitch3D's point clouds could be used with AR devices.