Not quite true wrt to nearmap. Both Aerometrex and Nearmap use Bentley ContextCapture to generate meshes from photogrammetry.
The meshes are points (point cloud), faces and textures. You can download all of this from Nearmap in the 3D subscriptions. So this photogrammetry work flow does indeed produce a point cloud. It isn't quite the same as lidar - eg vegetation penetration - but for buildings/urban etc there isn't much in it from a technical sense.
Another point of difference(s) - resolution - Nearmap capture more area more frequently at (slightly?) lower resolution - Aerometrex can turn up the dial massively to do custom jobs which even include street level imagery and terrestrial laser scan - see the sunshine coast data set. Most nearmap capture is circa 7cm pixels on the ground (gsd), Aerometrex regularly go to 2cm. But this requires a massive lift in compute to generate the meshes. I have started seeing 4cm for nearmap, so perhaps that will be more of a regular thing. The resolution also impacts on the density and accuracy of the underlying point cloud - so adding lidar would improve the mesh and vegetation penetration.
Nearmap don't (currently) use lidar in planes - albeit certain documents have mentioned "scanning" in next-gen capture - as a purist scanning to me means laser, but in the photogrammetry world, scanning can also mean images (cop out - my 2c).
You can't "fly through" the point cloud in nearmap like 3DP, but you can download tiles of data and view once you have it in myriad of viewers - or rehost yourself etc.
3DP Price at posting:
74.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
