Remember when you got your first bicycle? You probably started riding it with training wheels. Soon enough the training wheels came off, and then you eventually went looking for hills and jumps. At some point, as you became better, you took your hands off the handle bars. There was a liberating feeling of freedom, riding with your hands in the air, feeling the warm breeze as you blazed along on a hot summer afternoon.

Taking your hands off feels like freedom.

During the past few decades, we have seen metrology equipment move from manual gauges and optical scopes, to fully computer-controlled systems, but most of them were still making contact with a probe or tool to make a measurement. The training wheels were off, and we were speeding down a hill, but we still had our hands on the handlebars. Noncontact measurement has been available for a long time, but it is only during the last five years that it has really taken off.

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