The following is the full-length Q&A with Reality Capture Network Founder and CEO Matthew Byrd, covering the themes shaping R-CON 2026, expanded hands-on workshops, Innovation Village, the event’s new hackathon, and opportunities for networking and professional development.
For a shorter overview highlighting the key takeaways from the interview, read our summarized article: https://lidarnews.com/rcon-2026-workshops-learning/
R-CON 2026 Theme
Q: Through your conversations with exhibitors, speakers, sponsors, and attendees, where are you seeing the most excitement in reality capture right now?
Two things keep coming up, and they’re related.
The first is the shift from capture to intelligence. For years this industry has been focused on collecting data, better sensors, faster scans, denser point clouds. What people are excited about now is what happens after. AI and physical AI are a big part of that conversation, and for good reason. Every model that’s going to understand a jobsite has to learn from somewhere, and the built environment is where that training data lives. The people in our community are suddenly sitting on something extremely valuable, and they’re figuring out what that means for their businesses.
The second is honesty about what’s actually working. There’s real appetite right now for unfiltered conversations about accuracy, liability, and why reality capture programs fail. I hear it from owners and from service providers equally. Everybody has seen the polished case study; what they want is the practitioner who will tell them what went wrong and what it cost. Gaussian splatting and radiance fields are the other genuine bright spot, that’s the first thing in a while where seasoned professionals are experimenting like beginners again, and that energy is contagious.
Q: How have those conversations influenced the programming and overall direction of R-CON 2026?
Directly. You can see it in the titles. We have a panel called “The Battle of Reality Capture: Accuracy, Speed, Cost, Liability” because practitioners kept telling me they wanted an honest device-versus-device conversation, including who carries the liability when the data is wrong. We have a session titled “Reality Capture Is Lying to You: Why Most Programs Fail Before the Data Leaves the Field” from AECOM, and a workshop called “Is Your Data Actually Survey-Grade?” because the accuracy question wouldn’t go away. We built “From Skeptic to Advocate: Building the Business Case for Reality Capture” because the number one problem I hear from individual contributors isn’t technical, it’s that they can’t get their own leadership to buy in and they want to learn from others who have built successful business cases and scaled programs. And we dedicated a full panel plus multiple sessions to AI and physical AI, with people from firms like AWS, NVIDIA’s ecosystem, Boise State University, OpenSpace, Brick & Mortar Ventures, because that’s where the industry’s next five years get decided.
The bigger direction change is that we made the event more participatory. Listening to talks is valuable, but people learn by doing and they buy from people they trust. So we expanded the parts of R-CON where you use your hands and meet people, and we protected them on the schedule.
A More Hands-On R-CON
Workshops
Q: Why did you want to expand the hands-on educational component of R-CON?
Because the gap in this industry isn’t awareness anymore, it’s capability. Most people already know what a laser scanner or a drone can do. What they don’t have is a trusted place to learn how to do it correctly, or how to sanity check the work they’re already delivering. Formal education in reality capture barely exists, there’s no standard way of doing things, no clear career path, and most people learned on the job from whoever came before them.
That’s a problem RCN wants to help solve, and a conference is a rare chance to fix it at scale. When you have nearly 1,000 people in a building, many of whom are among the most experienced practitioners in the world, it’s a waste to keep all of them in an audience. So this year we put eight all-new workshops on the schedule running across four rooms alongside the exhibit hall and Innovation Village. Access is included with Full and VIP passes.
Q: How did you decide which subjects and skills should be addressed through workshops this year?
We built the lineup around three things: what the community asked for, where the risk is, and where the new frontier is.
The community asks constantly for fundamentals, so we start there — “Reality Capture 101 – Concepts,” led by Josh DeStefano of DPR Construction and Andrew Brister of Measured LLC through our RCN committees, is a beginner-friendly course for people who need to understand the whole landscape before they can act on it.
The risk category is accuracy and quality. “Is Your Data Actually Survey-Grade?” with Rami Tamimi of The Survey School looks at real projects that appeared clean and shows exactly where the error was hiding. We also partnered with ASPRS on two workshops — “Lidar Mapping with UAS” with Ravi Soneja of McKim & Creed and “Photogrammetric Mapping with UAS” with Michael Detwiler of Great Basin Geomatics — both taught to ASPRS Positional Accuracy Standards. Dylan Gorman of Pilotbyte runs “Aerial LiDAR 101” in two parts, with the second hour a live processing demo.
The frontier category is where I think people will be most surprised. Michael Rubloff of RadianceFields.com is running “An Introduction to Gaussian Splats,” Barry Bassnett of RICHPiX 360 is teaching “The Intelligent Lens,” which makes the case that your camera is the most undervalued tool in your kit, and Elizabeth Rosenbloom of LumenArc Labs is teaching open-source 3D geospatial workflows using Blender and GIS, because not every project needs a billion points.
Q: How technical or interactive should attendees expect these sessions to be, and who are they intended for?
It varies by design, and we labeled them so people can self-select.
Several are explicitly open to everyone with no prerequisites. Reality Capture 101 requires no experience or background at all. The Gaussian splats workshop requires no prior experience. The survey-grade accuracy session was built so you don’t need a surveying background to attend. Those are for the curious, the career changers, and honestly for a lot of managers who need to be able to ask better questions of their own teams.
Others are genuinely technical and assume you work in this every day. The UAS lidar and photogrammetry workshops walk through flight planning, ground control placement, processing, QC, and accuracy assessment. The aerial lidar session includes a live processing demo where you watch raw data become a usable deliverable.
Across all of them the format is instructional, not promotional. These are three-hour blocks with working practitioners at the front of the room, and the expectation is that you bring questions and leave with something you can apply in your work.
Innovation Village
Q: What is the idea behind the Innovation Village?
Innovation Village is a two-day showcase and innovation experience built specifically to help create a space for early stage Start-ups and innovation projects that are working to solve problems across the built environment. We wanted to create a space for early stage companies and ideas, as we believe in supporting innovation even at the smallest stage, and introducing them to the industry while they’re building.
The idea came from a practical problem. Startups and early-stage founders often can’t justify a full expo booth, and even when they can, they get lost. But those are exactly the companies our attendees want to find, and the early stage companies that are trying to solve unique problems. Companies at the leading edge get discovered when founders share ideas, demonstrate technology, and invite people into the conversation. Innovation Village exists to give them that opportunity, in a space designed for it.
It has four components: interactive startup booths for live demos and real conversations, live stage presentations in front of industry leaders and innovation scouts, a founder community area built for the collisions that only happen when the right people are in one room, and a curated emerging technology showcase.
Q: What kinds of companies, technologies, or ideas do you hope attendees will discover there?
We’re curating deliberately across multiple industries and technologies for this space, as we believe the most useful ideas in this industry usually arrive from an adjacent one. We want it to become a bit more open to cross-industry ideas and innovation for that reason.
We hope people find the software company solving the annoying part of their workflow that nobody else has bothered with. That owners and large firms find their next pilot partner. The investors and corporate development people in the room find companies they’d never have seen on a coastal demo day. We hope a few founders find each other and leave with a partnership. If a startup walks out of Innovation Village with one enterprise conversation that turns into a contract, or feedback from industry helps them shape what their building? we did our job and we’d call the Innovation Village successful, because it’s about shaping the future.
Applications to showcase are open at rcon2026.com/innovation-village.
Hackathon
Q: Why introduce a hackathon as part of a reality capture conference?
Because this industry has a translation problem. We have extraordinary data and extraordinary tools, and we mostly point them at documenting buildings. Meanwhile there are enormous regional and national problems that are fundamentally spatial problems, and almost nobody is connecting the two.
A hackathon forces that connection. It takes people who normally deliver a scope of work and asks them instead: here’s a real problem, what would you build? How would you solve this unique problem using your tech and skillsets? That’s a different muscle, and it’s the muscle this industry needs if we want to grow from service providers into intelligence providers.
It also fits what we’re trying to be. R-CON isn’t a trade show where you walk the floor and go home. Adding a hackathon and putting the finals on the Innovation Village stage says clearly that this is a place where things get built, not just demonstrated. Our goal is that this helps connect our industry to the broader startup and civic innovation ecosystem.
Q: What kinds of problems or challenges will participants be working on?
We chose two topics that matter to the American West and to the country, and that are genuinely solvable with the technology our community already owns.
Wildfire Resilience. Across the West, wildfire has stopped being a seasonal event and become a systems challenge affecting communities, utilities, transportation corridors, watersheds, and public lands. The two problem statements ask teams how we might use reality capture and related technologies to identify wildfire risk earlier and protect people and infrastructure before disaster strikes, and how we might equip emergency managers, utilities, and recovery teams with faster, more accurate post-fire intelligence so they can assess damage, prioritize action, and rebuild more resiliently.
Rare Earth & Minerals. Rare earth minerals underpin advanced technology, energy systems, manufacturing, and supply chain resilience. Teams are exploring how reality capture and advanced technologies can improve how these resources are identified, documented, assessed, and monitored, and how we de-risk and accelerate responsible development of projects that strengthen domestic manufacturing and strategic supply chains. That opens up site documentation, geological visualization, environmental monitoring, permitting and stakeholder communication, logistics planning, and decision-support tools.
In both cases the ask is the same: turn fragmented data into actionable intelligence.
Q: Who do you expect to participate?
A deliberate mix, and that mix is the point. Reality capture and geospatial professionals who know the data. Software developers and AI engineers who know how to build. Students and early-career people from Boise State and beyond who bring energy and no preconceptions about how things are supposed to work. And domain experts, people who’ve actually worked a fire line or a mine site, because a technically elegant solution to the wrong problem helps nobody.
We designed the program specifically to be welcoming to first-time challenge participants. It’s a guided program, not a free-for-all: teams applied, were matched with mentors or placed in a team in a virtual kickoff, submitted a white paper checkpoint over the summer to sharpen the credibility of the idea, built virtually with support, and refined their presentations ahead of the finals at R-CON where they will showcase their work.
Q: Is the primary goal competition, experimentation, collaboration, or potentially developing ideas that continue beyond the conference?
Honestly, the last one. The competition is just a fun part of the process, not the purpose.
There is recognition, and a live pitch on the Innovation Village stage on October 13, and that structure matters, deadlines and a stage make people finish things. But the reason we built it as a months-long guided program rather than a 48-hour sprint is that we want durable outcomes. Teams have mentors, checkpoints, a data set bank, and a white paper requirement, which are the things that turn a clever demo into something that could be funded, piloted, or spun out.
What success looks like to me: a team that keeps working together after October, a solution that a utility or an agency actually wants to test, and a handful of participants who discover they can build in this industry rather than only deliver in it. If we get one of those three every year, the hackathon earns its place permanently.
Networking and Building the Reality Capture Community
Q: Why has networking been such an important part of R-CON from the beginning?
Because that’s why RCN exists in the first place. Before there was a conference there was a community, a network of relationships, people scattered across the world doing this work, most of them the only person at their company who did it or working with a small team, with no obvious place to compare notes across the industry. RCN started as a way to connect those people. R-CON is that community in a room.
There’s also a practical reason. This industry moves faster than any documentation can keep up with. The most valuable information at any given moment isn’t published anywhere, it’s in the head of someone who tried that sensor last month, or negotiated that contract, or made that mistake. You get access to it through relationships, not search results. So we treat networking as core programming, not as an add-on. One of our attendees put it better than I can “it’s about the connections, the deep personal connections you make with people.”
And frankly, careers in this industry are built on relationships. Almost every good job, partnership, and first customer I’ve seen in reality capture came from someone knowing someone. We’d rather engineer that on purpose than leave it to chance.
Q: What networking opportunities are you creating at R-CON 2026?
We’ve built it into every day and every evening.
- Welcome Evening Happy Hour and Karaoke Night, Monday October 12 — we open the week with it, before a single session happens, so nobody walks into day one not knowing anyone.
- VIP Networking Happy Hour, Monday — an intimate hour for speakers, sponsors, and VIP tickets to come meet before the doors open to everyone.
- Club R-CON, Tuesday October 13 — the main stage becomes something else entirely at night, with a DJ, games, and the people you learned from all day.
- Gridiron & Drinks on Boise State’s Famous Blue Turf, Wednesday October 14 — we take it outside to one of the most iconic venues in the Treasure Valley, with games and the entire community on one of the most recognizable fields in college football, Boise State University’s blue field!
- Exhibitor happy hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday, so the demos and the conversations you had to cut short get to keep going with a drink in hand, and a special hour to check out the expo hall, so we make sure you get enough time to explore all solutions in the room.
- Lunch product highlights both days, fast, curated presentations from companies worth knowing about, while you eat a seated plated meal in the main hall. This is very different experience from a normal conference.
- The VIP experience a private lounge open all three days with workspace, snacks, drinks, and games, plus an exclusive closing-night dinner with keynote speakers hosted by RCN Founder, Matthew Byrd, with an open Q&A. (and might include a few special guests, fireside chats, etc) Seats are limited by design.
- The extended exhibit hall and closing happy hour on Thursday, which exists purely so nobody has to cut a good conversation short to catch the end of the show. Stay to the end of the event to finish off the final networking opportunities!
Q: For someone who wants to meet potential customers, collaborators, employers, or technology partners, what is the best way to approach R-CON?
Come with a specific goal and a short list of names, then work backward from the agenda.
Practically: read the speaker list and the exhibitor list before you fly in, pick ten people you want to meet, and reach out on LinkedIn beforehand, a message that says “I’ll be at R-CON, can we grab fifteen minutes Tuesday?” works far better than hoping to bump into someone, though that also happens all the time. Once you’re there, go to the evening events. That’s not a throwaway suggestion. The daytime is for content and demos; the evenings are where people actually get to know each other.
Also, lead with curiosity instead of a pitch. The fastest way to get someone’s attention in this room is to ask them a good question about their work. Everyone here is proud of something they built and slightly starved for people who understand it.
Finally, choose your pass with your goal in mind. If you’re here to explore the technology and network on the floor, the Expo Pass does that. If you want the content and the workshops and the evening events, you need a Full Pass. If your goal is senior relationships and dealmaking, the VIP Pass exists specifically for that, the lounge and the closing dinner put you at a table with the keynote speakers and the other executives in a way you can’t manufacture on a show floor.
Q: What advice would you give someone attending R-CON for the first time who may not already know many people in the industry?
You will not be the only one, and this is a friendlier room than you expect. Every year I watch people arrive alone on Monday and leave Thursday with a group text and new life-long industry friends.
A few concrete things. Show up Monday night for the first welcome reception, everyone is a stranger on Monday, which makes it the easiest night of the week to meet people. Sit next to someone new at every meal instead of retreating to your laptop; lunch is programmed for exactly that reason. Take a workshop, because sharing a three-hour room with twenty people gives you an instant, natural reason to talk to all of them. Ask people what they’re working on and what’s frustrating them right now, and you’ll never have to make small talk again.
And as the Founder of RCN and the host of this event, I tell people to come find me! I mean that literally, I’m at every event, and if you tell me it’s your first R-CON and what you’re trying to get out of it, I’ll introduce you to people. So will our team, our committee members, and honestly most of our speakers. That’s the whole point of building this thing. Nobody should have to stand at the edge of the room alone. We can’t wait to meet new people and welcome them to this growing community!
A special thank you to Matthew Byrd for taking the time to share his perspective on R-CON 2026 and the ideas, challenges, and opportunities shaping the reality capture industry. I’m excited to attend R-CON this year and experience the event firsthand. If you’ll be there as well, I hope to see you in Boise!
