The collaborative reality of reality-capture
We spoke with the team (Kathy Pattison, CMO & Head of Sales and Dave Strickler, Director, Cloud Services) at Kaarta and took a deep dive into our partnership. As always, the Kaarta team has been generous with their time and insight. We’re thankful for the opportunity to genuinely get to know our clients, understand their perspective, and what “working together” means to them.
Who is Kaarta and what is Kaarta Cloud?
Kaarta, the innovator of real-time mobile 3D reality capture, transforms the real world into its digital twin with unprecedented speed, fidelity and ease. Kaarta’s patented and patent-pending technology, rooted in advanced robotics, is a fast track from capture to answer, streamlining workflow, reducing time, lowering cost and providing a new level of understanding of spaces for humans and autonomous machines alike. Now the spectrum of stakeholders from facilities planners to managers, to natural resource management professionals and mobile robotics developers can work from the same truth.
Kaarta Cloud offloads the heavy lifting of the crucial processing of large 3D datasets. It offers the horsepower of an ultra high performance parallel-processed network to tackle the load of processing massive reality capture files, far surpassing the compute power available on any local workstation or Kaarta device.
Under the hood is Kaarta Engine, Kaarta’s patent-pending advanced 3D mapping and localization algorithms, providing highly accurate and robust maps. The marriage of Kaarta Engine’s advanced approach to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with the unbridled power of cloud-based processing is a powerful solution for today’s reality capture professionals.
How did you find Rivers Agile and how long have we been working together?
Rivers Agile was recommended by one of our colleagues as a firm he had worked with in the past and highly encouraged us to engage for the Kaarta Cloud project. Currently, Kaarta has been working with the Rivers Agile team for over 2 years as the project kicked off in October of 2019 – and we are continuing our relationship in 2022.
What were your pain points before you started working with Rivers Agile?
Kaarta is committed to continual improvement and strengthening the platform experience for our consumers. Our primary goal was to improve the user interface and ultimately the experience for Kaarta Cloud. We knew from the start that this engagement would specifically focus on UI functionality enhancements. Among those improvements, we wanted to upgrade the navigation’s decision tree and create an autochain engine to select a sequence of options to speed and enhance the user’s workflow.
What results have you gotten from Rivers Agile’s contributions?
The Rivers Agile team has been key in refining the visualization feature in Kaarta Cloud which has required a fair amount of front-end web-based work. As you can see, we’re very proud of the interactive dashboard that has been developed and perfected.
This interactive visualization of a registered point cloud of Cesar Chavez Park was produced by Kaarta Cloud from a Velodyne Ultra Puck raw lidar file. Try it out for yourself in the embedded window below or click here to open in a separate window.
Another important contribution has been security hardening, or making the application more secure for users. This hardening, when applied to software, reduces a system’s vulnerability by minimizing its attack surface. We’re working with massive amounts of data from our customers, so security hardening remains a constant focus. It’s a commitment to reducing any exposure to threats and to mitigate possible risks – not just for Kaarta, but for our consumers as well.
What do you value most about Rivers Agile’s contributions?
We appreciate that Rivers Agile has been an extension of the Kaarta Cloud team. The team primarily consists of a Project Manager, a UX/UI Designer, and a Development Oversight Manager, yet we wanted to involve a software developer who could commit to strictly front-end work. That’s where Rivers Agile came in and the addition has been seamless.
We value the ability to scale up (or scale down) resources as needed. It offers Kaarta the flexibility of both time and technology. In general when you engage a consulting firm, you want to know that they’re making informed recommendations to strategy and design, but also that they’re employing best practices throughout the process. Where we’ve seen the most value has been with cloud optimization as well as maintaining a focus on our long-term and short-term cost savings managing technical debt.
Would you recommend others to Rivers Agile?
Yes, we can confidently say we would recommend Rivers Agile on many fronts. They did a lot of listening and fact gathering up-front. Once the project got really into the weeds, Rivers Agile brought on their Lead Software Engineer and it all became clear. They were diligent in matching us with the right consultant, and they did it well. We also appreciate that we’ve had a dedicated resource on the project for an extended period of time, and that Rivers Agile has not had a revolving door of new people that would need to ramp up. Rivers Agile is flexible, and as the name suggests, agile. They’re always there when we need them (even off hours), and always able to easily pick up where we left off.
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We’re happy to share this thoughtful insight and amazing imagery from the fine people at Kaarta – just remember, we’re here to help. Rivers Agile can help you stabilize your engineering output, protect your project delivery, and scale your technology to meet increasing and changing demand. We have the ability to tailor these solutions to meet your specific needs, and expert technologists and engineers who can support a variety of solutions. Feel free to reach out to us anytime via our Contact Us page. We’re here to help.