If USU engineering professor Bob Pack could create a computer game for the lidar camera he invented with brother Brent, it would be an adventure game. Load the software and a three-dimensional, maneuverable image of the Grand Teton would appear on your screen, every crack and knob in its dizzying pyramid revealing itself instantly as you advance on the aerie goal of the contest: the summit. Someday Pack hopes to climb the mountain he has admired for years from other summits in the park. “You could circle the Grand in a helicopter and get all the images you need in a day,” he says of his imaginary game, “and within a week you’d have a computer model with details in centimeters.”

But the idea will have to wait because Pack is the co-inventor and patent producer, not the CEO anymore who thinks about sales. The company he started with a fellow geology major several years after graduating from college was left behind in 1998 for the collective altruism and practical problem-solving of a public land grant research university. He was given an office and a computer and a modest starter budget, and the rest was up to him. Five years later he finally persuaded the state-funded Utah Centers of Excellence in Salt Lake City to invest in a technology of considerable commercial value—the lidar camera.

Twenty years ago, as a recently graduated geological engineer, Pack found himself in a survey helicopter, wishing for an instrument that could capture 3-D images that could be downloaded onto a computer and rotated for multiple perspectives. A fiddler of survey instruments since early adolescence when he assisted his dad, a civil engineer and land developer, on field trips, Pack and his brother, a retired electrical engineer in Hawaii, began experimenting with lidar. This promising new technology produced pictures from reflected light measurements. Promising: a polite way of saying that certain limitations had yet to be overcome. Once the images were captured digitally, the operator had to manually integrate the data from each of the system’s finicky components.

The Pack brothers’ version is ten times faster and more accurate. The combination of lidar, digital photography and GPS compresses several weeks’ worth of scanning and processing into a matter of days. Several hundred thousand shots per second of a moving object from another moving object versus the half-a-dozen shots at best of a stationery object that a regular digital camera can manage. Despite the technical complexity of the Pack brothers’ Texel camera, its digital files are small enough to be emailed, and the detail is so crisp, you can see the grins on the mountaineers who made the top.

Convincing the Utah Centers of Excellence to invest in this technology took some time. “The technical part of a new idea is not the hard part,” Pack says. “The hard part is demonstrating the technology’s place in the world.”

With the financial backing of a state economic development office and technical support from his growing team of engineering and computer science research faculty and students, Pack charged ahead. USU’s Space Dynamics Lab provides the necessary expertise in aerospace engineering design and production, and optical electronics and mechanics.

A technology inspired while surveying road sites in British Columbia in “gosh-awful” jungles booby trapped with raging creeks and vertical cliffs, has been deployed in service of U.S. military airborne reconnaissance missions to detect hidden tanks and artillery. And USTAR, a recently funded state science, technology and research initiative, has thrown its weight behind the project with several million dollars in subsidies for further research and development so that more companies, besides InteliSum in Salt Lake City, can get into the licensing act and profit. Within a few months of signing its licensing agreement with the university, InteliSum was conducting road and bridge damage surveys for clients in several states. Another company, a defense department contractor, is negotiating for a license that will secure more business in the hidden explosive detection market.

Now that their funding is secure, Pack and his team are pushing the boundaries even further; they’ve designed a handheld camera that can perform in tight quarters such as crime scenes, houses about to be put on the market, and historical and scenic sites that lend themselves to computer games and movie production sets.
The miniaturized camera could supplant the painstaking and time-consuming art of computer graphics that won Lord of Rings the Oscar, slashing production costs. If Pack and his team succeed in enlarging the storage capacity for the millions of bits of processed data for each “photo assignment,” the sky’s literally no limit. Their cameras already have enough storage capacity to accompany NASA missions into space for hair-trigger rendezvous-and-docking maneuvers and instantaneous observations that can be interpreted by robots—at no risk to humans. It’s just a matter of convincing the people in charge, Pack says. After eight years in academia, the art of entrepreneurship still comes naturally.-Jane Koerner