The Experience
For those of us who used to attend the Leica Geosystems HDS User Conference in laid back San Ramon, California, Hexagon 2012 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada was at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, but that is not Thinking Forward–the theme of this year’s conference. First of all congratulations to the Hexagon event organizers and the MGM staff–they put on a first class event, particularly when you consider that they had thousands of (hungry) people to accommodate, often in a matter of minutes.
Variations on the Think Forward theme were everywhere. The evening social events included Think Progress, Think Exploration and Think Again with the latter including an Elvis impersonator, who could really sing and other retro Vegas acts that were a lot of fun. If you were not able to attend, fear not, word is they signed a 3 year deal. Next year’s conference will be held June 36, 2013.
Hexagon AB, the parent company has 3 major divisions—Hexagon Metrology, Intergraph and Leica Geosystems. This conference recap will mainly focus on Geosystems, in fact primarily the HDS or laser scanning track. I wish it were possible to cover it all, but it was more than a challenge, especially logistically at times to get to all of the sessions that looked interesting.
I must admit I wonder sometimes how many people are interested in reading these recaps, but much to my surprise one of the Geosystems marketing people credited last year’s recap with helping to increase this year’s attendance, which was up 70% I believe–very encouraging.
Overall more than 3,000 people from 76 countries attended this year’s event. There were over 40 sessions representing 29,000 hours of information transfer plus 60 sponsors in the trade show.