What Would the World Miss If Virtual Surveyor Didn't Exist?
- Akshata
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Advanced technology and drones have changed the way project sites are captured and understood, but the surveyor remains at the core of everything. A drone is simply a tool that photographs a site or uses LiDAR to create a digital copy of the terrain. The real work of interpreting that data and producing a meaningful survey still belongs to a skilled professional. Virtual Surveyor honors that reality and puts the surveyor in a virtual world built from drone data, where they can do everything they have always done; faster, safer, and without leaving the office.
That story captures the deeper meaning of what the world would miss if Virtual Surveyor didn't exist for surveyors, mine operators, construction managers, and the people who work in industries that shape the physical landscape around us.
A Pivot on a Piece of Feedback
Virtual Surveyor didn't begin as a software company. It began as a Belgian geospatial services firm, processing satellite images and digital elevation models (DEMs) to create 3D visualizations for landscape modeling and environmental impact assessments. The end products were typically used in Geographic Information System (GIS) software for landscape modeling and environmental impact assessments by a variety of customers.
Then came a request from an African surveying company who wanted its drone photos of open pit mines processed. Tom Op 't Eyndt, the founder of Virtual Surveyor, figured this was a reasonable ask as a drone photo is essentially a high-resolution satellite image. Even though that proved to be an optimistic assumption, particularly with the software tools available in 2011, the team pulled it off, built a visually realistic 3D rendering of the mine, and sent it to Africa.
The client’s response was “This looks nice, but there’s not much we can do with it,”. The client acknowledged that the 3D rendering looked impressive, but made clear it served little practical purpose in its current form. What they actually needed were break lines captured from the model. The kind of survey deliverables that could feed directly into the engineering design software used to plan their mining activities. Tom decided to program some survey tools around that 3D model.
The pivot was swift. In 2012, the Virtual Surveyor Tools drone surveying package was born and with it, the bridge between drone image photogrammetry and professional surveying.
Surveying in a Virtual World
The conceptual leap the Belgian team made was both elegant and practical. Instead of forcing surveyors to continue doing fieldwork in physically demanding, sometimes hazardous environments, the software created a ‘video game-like’ 3D virtual environment built from drone data, where the surveyor could do their work safely, accurately, and in a fraction of the time.
Inside this virtual environment, the surveyor can view the landscape from any position and perspective, even being able to ‘walk around’ it. Using the software's tools, they draw breaklines, collect XYZ coordinate points, and triangulate those points into what surveyors call a Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) model. That TIN model can then be exported as a lightweight Computer-aided design (CAD) model to any third-party civil engineering design package.
The result was a dramatic leap in efficiency. Surveyors could now safely and accurately capture complex survey data on-screen in a fraction of the time. The package was accessible and affordable, gaining traction quickly with mines, quarries, and other earthmoving operations.
The Crisis That Forged a Better Product
From its early days as a geospatial services firm, the company had relied on a third-party 3D engine for its visualization capabilities. That engine carried instability problems along with it, as well as licensing and technological limitations that constrained the software's growth. The team first switched to a different third-party engine, but eventually concluded that building their own 3D engine from scratch was the only path to achieving their ambitions.
In 2014, the company embarked on that rebuild from a blank sheet, promoting the product name to simply Virtual Surveyor software, dropping Tools. The development took far longer and cost significantly more than anticipated, pushing the business to the edge of survival. What emerged was a far more capable product, one built on a foundation that could support major new functionality, including volumetric calculations. Reflecting on the experience, CEO Op 't Eyndt noted that if he were to do it over again, he would pursue a more limited scope and a faster time to market. The lesson was costly, but the product became stronger for it.
The Features That Almost Didn't Happen
As the software grew in popularity, users began requesting capabilities that pushed beyond virtual surveying into analysis and quantification. The most common request was the ability to compare drone images of a site captured at two different points in time. Through photogrammetric modeling and comparison of 3D views, users could perform change detection over time, cut-and-fill calculations, and other temporal analyses that had previously been carried out in separate engineering packages.
According to Tom, “initially, we were concerned that such enhancements strayed too far from the core value proposition of the product”. But eventually they relented, and the ability to compare multiple surveys over time was added. The decision proved transformative, attracting an entirely new category of customers from the construction and earthworks sector.
Encouraged, Virtual Surveyor took the concept one step into the future. Clients were given tools to design and render future topographies like mine access roads, water retention ponds, and planned earthworks within the 3D environment. Users could now see how future structures would look, balance the volumes, and verify structural soundness before a single bucket of earth was moved. The ability to plan, visualize, and validate a project inside a virtual environment before committing to real-world construction reduces waste, catches design errors early, and gives decision-makers more clarity.
A Product Shaped by Time
The breadth of what Virtual Surveyor now offers is best understood through its subscription structure which is organized around landscape features. Each tier corresponds to a different relationship with survey data across time:
Valley is the free viewing version, introducing users to drone surveying concepts without a financial commitment. It's the entry point for newcomers to explore the virtual environment.
Ridge is the foundational surveying tier, the tools for capturing and analyzing a site at a single point in time. Drawing breaklines, collecting points and allowing advanced editing. This is the original core of Virtual Surveyor.
Mountain moves into time, enabling comparison of multiple topographic surveys taken at different points. It powers change detection, cut-and-fill analysis, and the temporal capabilities that opened up a new customer segment when first introduced.
Peak takes it into the future, adding tools to design, render, and evaluate planned future topographies within the same 3D environment. It's where virtual surveying becomes virtual planning.
Cloud Integration Built In
In conversations about what sets Virtual Surveyor apart, attention tends to focus on the 3D environment, the breakline tools, the volumetric calculations, and the temporal comparison capabilities. These are the headline features, but the built-in cloud integration with Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive often goes unsung while making an enormous practical difference.
Users can securely store their project files in cloud accounts they already pay for, which means automatic backup and recovery, access from anywhere, and easy collaboration with colleagues at remote locations without adopting a new platform or paying for additional cloud drone storage. Built-in integration of this nature can save considerable cost compared to cloud drone platforms, and it reveals a team thinking about how their product fits into the real working lives of real users.
Don't Fall for the Drone Hype
Tom has offered advice worth repeating for anyone thinking about entering the drone surveying space. He emphasizes the importance of stepping away from the hype about the drone itself. In Tom’s own words, “yes, they are cool and somewhat novel, but at the end of the day the drones are simply tools that enable workers to do their jobs faster, better, cheaper and more safely”.
Except for businesses that actually build drones, the focus should center on end-user applications. That is where the revenues are, and that is where the most meaningful impact for the customer is achieved. Virtual Surveyor used this insight. The African mining company didn't want a drone image, they wanted survey deliverables. The software that creates those deliverables efficiently and accurately is where the real value lives.
What Would the World Miss?
Imagine a surveyor spending four full days every single month walking around a dusty materials yard, measuring the circumference and height of every stockpile of sand, gravel, and stone. It's slow and on some days, it's outright dangerous. That was the reality for one construction materials supplier before Virtual Surveyor entered the picture, and this would have been the world without Virtual Surveyor.
After adopting a drone and the Virtual Surveyor software package, the construction materials supplier in question handed the entire monthly chore off to his secretary. She now completes the same task in half a day, saving three and a half working days, every month, without setting foot near the stockpiles.
Without Virtual Surveyor, the world would miss software priced accessibly for the professionals who need it. It would miss software built around a surveyor's existing skill set and workflow, one that extends their competencies into a faster, safer medium. A surveyor who understands how to capture data in the field understands how to capture it in Virtual Surveyor's virtual environment, because the logic is the same.
It would miss a workflow genuinely simple enough that a secretary can run stockpile volume calculations in half a day.
It would miss highly accurate virtual surveys using both optical imagery and LiDAR data captured by drone, survey-grade outputs that engineering software can actually use, not just visualizations that look impressive but deliver nothing actionable.
Finally it would miss the safety that comes from keeping surveyors off dangerous ground.
