If your job involves capturing existing field conditions as part of the design and construction process, you’ll know it’s a tedious, manual, often analog and inaccurate process, which often leads to costly re-work.

Whether you’re renovating a building or involved in a large-scale infrastructure project, the process goes something like this:

As any surveyor or field engineer knows, capturing existing field conditions for an infrastructure project or building renovation is a tedious, manual, often analog, and inaccurate process – not to mention dangerous.

Renovations projects are a particular challenge since the infrastructure or building may be decades old and designed before the age of digital blueprints. You’re almost guaranteed to start a project using static 2D image documentation of existing conditions. Verifying and updating these manually is a lot of leg work.

Reality capture technology as a means of capturing existing as-built conditions has been around for some time. Terrestrial laser scanning or LiDAR is just one example of reality capture (or recap) at work. But recap hasn’t always been easy. Scanning techniques are often expensive and the task of incorporating and manipulating large data sets (point clouds) during the design process is tricky.