Continuing our relationship with Tigard

Continuing our long collaboration with the City of Tigard, we have recently begun a new consultation project focused on helping the City envision and define their next generation GIS architecture. The goal is to equip Tigard for growing geospatial demands while simplifying the upkeep and maintenance of their resources so that they are easily maintainable by current staff.
That’s no small task, when you think about it. Location data is growing in importance for both government and industry, as well as individuals. GIS used to be it’s own separate fiefdom within most organizations. Something that was a secondary concern compared to other IT needs. But now GIS data is being being folded into everyday workflows and applications.

So how do we simplify a process that seems to be ever-growing in complexity? For starters, we do our homework. We look closely at the City’s current architecture and the workflows it supports; we look at the maintenance effort and procedures require to sustain the current system; we review the needs of different stakeholder and end user groups. With information gathered from these activities, we are able to accurately characterize the current state of operations, complete with areas of risk, and areas where changes, expansions, and improvements are most desired. We can then combine some industry research and peer review information with our own experience working with many other organizations to optimize their geospatial systems to develop a responsive set of recommendations for Tigard’s next generation GIS platform.

Some of the factors to be addressed through completion of this project include:

• overall system resiliency,
• increasing geospatial capabilities of - and integration with - business systems,
• expansion of the mobile workforce,
• expansion of cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization,
• simplified design and publishing of focused geospatial applications, and
• simplified promotion of development resources to production environment.

Interns!

It’s a very exciting week for us here at the Gartrell Group. We have taken on our first set of interns!

We have a history of doing informational interviews with folks who are just finishing up school and looking at the horizon. Over the years, we have made many introductions to people up and coming in the Portland tech scene. Additionally, we have hired many of these folks in small and focused sub-contracting engagements as a means to identify and help cultivate tech talent and to help people along their careers. We view it is a both a benefit of being part of the local tech scene and a contribution to that community.

Right now, we’ve got three interns; two recent graduates of Epicodus, a local coding academy (our most recent hire, Drew, is a graduate). They will be working on a software product we are bringing to market. We also have brought in a high school student who will be learning some of the basics of video editing in order to assist us with FAQ videos for our clients and internal use.

We make an effort to set up programs so they are mutually beneficial and provide the opportunity for real world experience. Real coding. Real business experience.

Our interns are being offered the opportunity to apply learning from their classroom environment and add depth and focus not possible in survey courses or fast-moving curricula. The project that we have them working on is not a throwaway, example job. It is a real software product that we have been developing for some time now and are in the final process of bringing to market. Their work will be invaluable (in that we’re not paying them anything. That was an intern joke…).

We will likely have openings for interns next summer. If interested, send us a line.

Getting Virtual

We recently paid a visit to some software colleagues in Oregon City. Since we’re in the business of mapping, you probably think we visited fellow digital cartographers, or maybe hung out with some javascript developers.
Here, I’ll give you a hint:

We went to visit the folks at SuperGenius Studio, a gaming development shop that specializes in virtual and augmented reality.

What would a mapping software company have in common with a gaming company? When you stop to think about it, virtual reality places great emphasis on the development of a powerful and richly defined sense of place. As virtual worlds expand in scope and detail, the techniques of mapping in the real-world may be applied to virtual space and they may be used to support navigation that is simultaneously in real and digitally crafted places. It’s a bit of a brain-stretch, I know, but the day is coming when we will have robust virtual worlds that co-exists with the real world.

Less of a brain-stretch and something that is is already upon us is augmented reality (AR). Pokémon Go is an example of gamified AR, where gamers use the camera in their phones to view the real-world and place virtual characters onto it. Google made an attempt to bring AR into the mainstream with Google Glass. It is no longer available to consumers, but while it was available, users could wear a set like they wear glasses and view contextual information within their field of view. Google is continuing to explore the technology in factories and other industrial settings.

The potential uses of VR and AR and their scope of application is growing exponentially with the progressive implementation of the “smart city,” with expansion of building information modeling (BIM) and through the ever-enriching network of  the internet of things (IOT) reporting out their status, condition and activity.

Imagine being a maintenance worker in an unfamiliar building and using your phone (or a pair of glasses) to “see” into a wall to find the utilities you are seeking out, planning your work or identifying the location of a hot spot, rupture or line break. Or maybe you’re a field crew supervisor in your office, donning goggles and “going down” to direct the work of  a technician while you examine a complicated arrangement underground assets they are working on.  Or you might be a firefighter with floor plans displayed in your field of view as you navigate smoke-filled hallways. These are examples of forthcoming scenarios where our expertise can complement the work of folks in the VR/AR space such as the crew at SuperGenius.

This field trip was the beginning of a discussion. No current VR/AR projects to report on just now, though we do have some prototyping and exploration work coming up. Mainly we just wanted to share some thoughts on trends and possibilities concerning this next major platform. ...and to show you how cool we look in the glasses.