Archeological surveys in untouched areas are tricky at the best of times. Vegetation and trees must be disturbed, heavy equipment is brought in, and the results can still prove inconclusive or fruitless.

But thanks to laser technology, that’s all changing. LiDAR (aka Light Detection and Ranging technology) is helping archeologists champion scientific research without disturbing the natural habitat.

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.