Built by someone who lived the problem.

Where it started — underground

Alex started his career as a mechanical engineer in mining. The work was about machines and infrastructure that nobody outside the operation ever got to see — gear in places that were dark, dangerous, or simply too remote to send a person to twice. The data captured on a single inspection was the only record anyone would have of that asset until the next shutdown.

After years in the mines, Alex left to start his own business — initially as a Google Trusted Photographer, capturing the inside of buildings for Street View. The brief was simple, but the medium was new: stitched 360° imagery, navigable in a browser, with no software to install. People walked around inside places they'd never set foot in.

From Street View to spatial data

That work led naturally into custom virtual tours, then into VR and AR experiences, then into flying drones to capture the outside of the same places he'd been photographing inside. From there it was a short step into 3D mapping, photogrammetry, LiDAR, and the broader world of spatial data — beautiful capture, sitting on hard drives that nobody could open.

In 2016, Alex and his sister Laura co-founded Lateral Vision — an immersive technology and 3D capture company based at Lot Fourteen in Adelaide, South Australia, with a second base in the Hunter Valley. Over a decade they've worked across mines (open-cut pits in the Pilbara, underground operations where GPS didn't reach), reefs, infrastructure, heritage sites, wineries, sporting venues, and remote outback landmarks. Trusted by brands including BHP, SkyCity, Adelaide Oval, Seppeltsfield, UniSA, and Journey Beyond.

They built custom virtual tours, VR experiences, interactive maps, and bespoke web viewers for clients who needed more than an off-the-shelf embed. They sent drones over construction sites, rail corridors, and coastal studies. They used industrial LiDAR rigs to scan infrastructure that hadn't been measured since it was built.

"We started building our own HTML viewers to share what we'd captured — and realised what the web could actually do for spatial data. But at the same time it was absurd how hard the basics still were: file storage, security, access controls."

The problem that wouldn't go away

The technology to capture spatial data got incredible. Drones got cheaper. LiDAR scanners got lighter. Photogrammetry software got smarter. But the delivery side never evolved.

After years of this, the workflow was still the same: export a point cloud, zip it up, upload to Dropbox, email a link, hope the recipient had the right software to open it, and then spend the next three days answering "how do I open this file?" emails.

The people who needed to see what we'd captured — site managers, engineers, councils, conservation teams, the people who'd commissioned the work — couldn't view what they'd paid for. Files were too large to email. Storage scattered across Dropbox, Google Drive, and USB drives. There was no way to share a branded deliverable without it looking like a rough handoff.

Why Swyvl

Alex built Swyvl to fix the delivery problem — not the capture problem.

The idea is straightforward: upload your spatial files (LAS, GeoTIFF, drone video, 3D models, PDFs) to Swyvl, organise them by site and capture session, and share them via a branded link. Whoever opens the link — a client, a colleague, a contractor, a regulator, the public — sees a professional, interactive experience in any browser, with no software to install.

The professional looks the part. The recipient actually engages with the data. And every delivery builds a permanent, organised record of what was captured, when, and where.

What we're building toward

The delivery problem is the first thing we're solving. What we're actually building is the system of record for physical environments — and there are three stages to that.

Deliver. Any field professional shares any file type via a branded link. Anyone with the link opens it in any browser and sees everything instantly — point clouds, orthomosaics, 3D models, photos, documents. No software required.

Remember. Every delivery builds a record. Each visit adds a layer to the site's history — time-indexed, anchored to real-world coordinates, growing more valuable with every capture. Not just storage. Spatial memory.

Query. That accumulated record will become answerable — by your team, by the AI agents being built to operate over the physical world, and by anyone who needs to understand what this place looked like and what's changed over time. The spatial record won't just be an archive. It will be infrastructure.

We're early. The delivery problem is where we start. But every link sent, every site record built, every timeline that grows — that's the foundation. We're building this from the field up, shaped by years of actually doing the work.