3D Heritage: Reality Capture and Large-Scale 3D Printing—a 2-Way Road

Our company, ACCIONA, has been committed since its 1862 founding to pushing forward innovation in order to develop nontraditional ways to solve problems, and to always looking for new business and new initiatives. That is the main reason why, 3 years ago, ACCIONA's Innovation Division started to work in 2 different technologies: reality capture, looking to transform the real world into a digital world; and large-scale 3D printing, aimed at creating new 3D-printed elements from CAD digital files. Both technologies were especially interesting for preserving our cultural heritage. In order to probe both worlds-physical and digital are interconnected due to both technologies-in ACCIONA, we decided to start a pilot project that let us capture an existing structure (like a sculpture or a part of a building) using reality capture technology, and then 3D print a replica using concrete large-scale 3D-printing technology.