We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!
We call it SpatialVideo, because it doesn’t just allow you to record video alongside your Fulcrum field collection surveys – as you record video within Fulcrum, it also records a GPS track log that syncs with your video, allowing you to follow the location of the video frame by frame on a map. When you record video in the field, it gets uploaded to the Fulcrum cloud, where you can play back and review your collections right in your web browser. Using video capture is great for doing all sorts of collection including:
- Asset inventory & identification
- Pipeline alignment surveys
- Power line & pylon surveys
- Facilities inspections
Video capture has historically been costly, requiring dedicated cameras and hardware. In order to conduct roadway alignment surveys, or construction site reviews using video documentation, it involved loaning out extremely expensive equipment to surveyors, then waiting to pull together the data manually in the back-office for review. Using consumer-grade hardware (like Android devices or iPhones), teams can use the device they carry everywhere to document quick clips, or mount the device in their vehicle to drive the length of a road widening project, then sync everything they’ve captured up to the centralized cloud account for management and review. Fulcrum even has an option to record the audio track with the video, so an inspector can make voice annotations and comments as they’re walking a construction site or a facility inspection.
Within the Fulcrum iOS and Android apps, you also have total control over video quality, both resolution and frame rate. Based on your needs, being able to adjust quality gives you a way to manage file sizes and storage.
Along with the GPS location track, our video recorder also logs the heading, speed, altitude, and even the camera viewshed. As you can see in the above video clip, the red cone during playback rotates based on the direction the camera is facing. Combined with high-resolution imagery, this allows you to identify buildings, road signs, poles, and lots more right from the imagery as you’re scrubbing through your collected video. With high definition video, pausing the clip gives you nice crisp frames for picking out features.
Video fields can be added right alongside your other form data fields in Fulcrum apps, with validations, conditional rules, and all the rest of Fulcrum’s powerful data collection configuration options to give you the best results from field surveys.
Check out the plans page to see which plan is right for you to get started using video capture. Also grab the latest updates to the iOS or Android app to get access from mobile, including a host of other new features like hyperlink field support, auto-save, and other media settings. Stay tuned to the blog and follow us on Twitter for more news on additional announcements.