✨ Orion is currently in Beta and available for selected projects only ✨
If you’re interested in accessing Orion, please contact your Sensat Customer Partner for more information.
What is Orion?
Orion is Sensat’s AI-powered visual search engine. It transforms 2D Digital Landscape data into an intelligent, searchable environment. With Orion, any user—not just GIS specialists—can instantly locate critical assets or features across their entire project area using simple text search (e.g. “pylon”) or by drawing directly on the map.
Access & Permissions
Project-level access:
Orion is available only to users with the roles Project Member+, Admin, or Super Admin.
Learn more about project roles here.
Workspace-level access:
Any user with access to a workspace can use Orion to search (this includes Workspace Guests).
However, only users with Workspace Contributor permissions or higher can save search results as a layer.
Learn more about workspace permissions here.
Current limitations
Orion currently supports searching 2D Digital Landscape layers only.
To use Orion in a workspace, the following conditions must be met:
A 2D Digital Landscape exists in your project.
A 2D Digital Landscape is added to the Workspace.
You are in the 2D environment within the Workspace.
How to use Orion
Launching Orion
Click the Orion button in the top-right corner of the screen to open the Orion search panel.
Searching for features
You can search in two ways:
1. Text Search
Type what you are looking for in the search box.
Tips for better results:
Use single-word prompts whenever possible.
Choose terms from the ‘Suggested Searches’ where possible - Orion has been trained on these and results will be more accurate.
2. Drawing Search
Click the pencil icon next to the search box.
Draw around the feature you want to match and find.
Tip: Drawing search works best for finding like-for-like matches and can be more accurate than text searches for visually distinctive features.
Viewing and managing search results
Search results appear in the Orion panel once the search is complete.
Each result shows a confidence score.
Click on an individual result to fly to it in the scene.
Remove unwanted results by clicking the ‘X’.
Accidentally deleted a result? Click “Undo delete”.
In the scene, results with higher confidence are shown with higher opacity (darker turquoise).
Saving search results as a layer
Once satisfied with the results, click “Save as layer” at the bottom of the Orion panel.
The new GeoJSON layer will appear in the Scene Manager, and behaves like any other layer, e.g.:
Turn it on/off, adjust opacity.
Delete, download, add descriptions, attachments, timeline dates, or comments as usual.
By default, the layer is named after your search term, but you can rename it.
The layer is initially saved within the workspace where the search was performed. To share with other workspaces or save for future use, you can publish markups to Content. [See details here.]
Tweaking search results
Open Search Settings (top of the panel) after results appear.
Search Sensitivity:
Range: Precise → Broad
Broad sensitivity returns more results, often with lower confidence.
Search Strength:
Range: Weak → Strong
Stronger searches take longer but are more thorough; weaker searches are faster but may return fewer matches.
