Drone manufacturer DJI partners with Bentley Systems to bundle ContextCapture with products.

Bentley Systems is flying high with ContextCapture, its product developed from technology brought in with the acquisition of photogrammetry experts Acute3D in 2015. Most recently Bentley’s Acute3D group announced an alliance with company DJI, a leading Drone manufacturer (according to a Fortune article) headquartered in Guangdong, China.

Bentley Systems highlighted ContextCapture at the company’s annual Year in Infrastructure conference in London last November. Since the acquisition Bentley has continuously developed ContextCapture for use in AEC and GIS applications and has integrated it into its MicroStation Connect products.

DJI will offer its drones packaged with ContextCapture. Bentley offers ContextCapture in 3 different packages:

ContextCapture –A desktop version for customers who can create the models they need with up to 100 gigapixels of photos taken with ordinary cameras.

ContextCapture Center—Designed for multidirectional capture systems—airborne and terrestrial. ContextCapture Center can process content from multiple cameras and sensors. It supports parallel processing for multiple CPU cores, across machines, and with cloud processing.

Acute3D Viewer—Explore and measure reality meshes. Switch on and off the display of phototextures, triangulate surfaces, and point clouds to understand existing conditions. Acute3D Viewer can be downloaded for free from the Acute3D website.

What do we think?

ContextCapture will enable DJI customers to create meaningful models from content captured from drones. It’s a licensing deal that brings the software out into a larger customer base – and given the popularity of drones for professionals and consumers could extend the awareness of Bentley Systems.