Our staff did an extraordinary job in the challenging 2020, overcoming every obstacle to make it the biggest year ever for Aerometrex and one that sets us up well for 2021. Below are some of our standout highlights, new services, and completed projects. For everything we mention, there's plenty more in motion that we can't wait to talk about in future.
2020 highlights at a glance:
2020 is our first full calendar year as an ASX listed company, and we have a few corporate milestones to celebrate. It was our strongest financial year to date despite all the challenges presented by travel and interaction limitations. Download our AGM Presentation if you want to read more about our financial performance.
The Aerometrex workforce grew by 33, reaching 116 in total across our Adelaide, Buderim, and Denver offices. The scale of our projects this year required a significant investment in skilled workers, and the performance of all staff, old and new, has been outstanding.
We opened Aerometrex office in the United States of America as a launchpad for our 3D services into that market. We’ve trained a capture team who’s already done some impressive work in downtown Denver. We look forward to how the USA team grows in 2021, and to capturing more of the beautiful cities.
MetroMap continues to flourish and grow with an ever-expanding subscriber list from individuals to large corporates benefiting from our high-quality 2D and 3D products. Annual recurring revenue grew 6.7 times from September 2019 to September 2020, making it a significant revenue stream for us.
We completed the acquisition of the Australian aerial imagery subscription operations of Spookfish Australia Pty Ltd and its parent company EagleView Technologies Australia. Customers of EagleView transitioned to our MetroMap system and existing MetroMap users gained the benefit of EagleView’s captures.
MetroMap’s growth, and the customer feedback we receive about it, makes us very excited for that platform’s future.
Our proprietary camera system MetroCam that we developed in-house was used for the first time in the field. MetroCam vastly increased our imagery capture capabilities, letting us make 5cm pixel size captures at the same flight elevation typically used for 7.5cm imagery. Increasing both capture resolution and speed is a major efficiency gain for our services.
Our R&D team did some truly groundbreaking work with LiDAR this year. The flagship project is a world’s first bushfire fuel load mapping service that will directly impact fire management from preparation and prevention activities to real-time response during bushfire events. We can give data on fuel load tons per hectare, stratified fuel loads from the ground to canopy, significant water sources, and Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) ratings.
We also collaborated with sixteen local councils to assess urban tree canopy management. Our data precisely maps the location and area size of tree canopies as part of strategies to manage urban forests.
Beyond those jobs, our LiDar team built classified off-the-shelf point clouds of Sydney and Melbourne that you can see in our Metromap LiDAR viewer.
It was, literally, a big year for creating 3D models. Our 3D team captured nearly half a million frames across 29 unique jobs.
We built large-scale 3D models overseas; with Pau in France, Denver, Centennial, and Philadelphia in the U.S.A, and Karlsruhe in Germany captured and rendered.
In Australia, we helped to build Digital Twins in Western Sydney, Fishermans Bend in Melbourne. Those models show the power of Digital Twins in urban planning and development and how those assets can benefit large scale planning projects.
One of our proudest projects was in Bendigo where our final street-level enhanced model is stunningly detailed.
The 3D team has done some eye-popping work inside gaming engines. We’ve worked with Unreal Engine and TwinMotion to bring our city captures to life and find new visualisation systems. We were lucky enough to do an interview with Unreal Engine talking about our work in that field.
Our R&D team developed an AI classification system that recognises buildings, foliage, cars, surface types, and other structures in our 3D mesh models. AI classification makes our 3D mesh models far more powerful by adding data to imagery. Users can isolate and analyse different aspects of the mesh models and add attribute data to any features they want. That new capability makes our models more powerful and more efficient to create.
Our amazing flight crews deserve special recognition for this year. They’ve done a high quantity and quality of work despite all of the difficulties travelling across borders. They’ve responded at short notice to take on multiple large projects throughout the year. Their work keeps all of our projects moving and we thank them for the hard work.
Our end of year message for 2020 is a simple one; that we are grateful for the support of everyone we've worked for, and with, in this strangest of years. We appreciate every one of our clients, staff, collaborators, MetroMap users, subscribers, supporters and wellwishers. We wish everyone the best for the upcoming holiday season. Nothing is taken for granted in 2020, and we look forward to working with you again in 2021!