Surveyor using 3D scanner to preserve San Francisco’s religious history

A surveying enthusiast is on a mission to capture 3D models of historic churches in his home town of San Francisco to help with their historic preservation. Scott Page is using the 3D laser scanner to capture detailed images of the churches, amassing enormous point clouds of data that are then processed into a highly-accurate 3D simulation of the buildings. Page said that the 11-pound laser scanner allows for the work to be carried out extremely quickly. It is also very versatile and can be placed at a number of locations around the various churches, taking five minutes to complete a single scan rotation, but gathering millions of data points as it does so. Scott told The Atlantic, “This is a direct offshoot of what photographs started as… Like our brains, we can go around and look at everything in a room, close our eyes, and imagine what a room looks like from different positions, even though we were only standing in one of them. The computer in the scanner does that as well.” For each church Page gathers information from around 30 different scan positions, both inside and out, then uses software to unify all of the sets of data and create the models.