I just finished speaking with Dale Lutz one of the founders of Safe Software. They have just released FME 2013 which as you can see now has support for E57. To make a 30 min conversation short, Dale was so impressed with the performance of E57 that they are re-architecting their entire platform for 2014 in order to take full advantage of what the E57 libraries are capable of doing.
He stated that because of the extremely large files sizes inherent with point clouds that the high performance of E57 will now be their model for all of FME’s data conversion engine. They have also created a number of utilities for manipulating point clouds that may be of interest. Similar to grid algebra for raster data, Dale calls this “point algebra”.
There are few people more knowledgeable about geospatial data conversion than Dale. This is a remarkable tribute to all of the people involved in this effort. Thanks Dale for your vote of confidence.
