The future of reality capture: What’s next for laser scanning?

Posted: March 19, 2025

When we think about digital twins, we often imagine them in the context of ambitious greenfield projects and enormous budgets—digitally connected manufacturing factories, state-of-the-art renewable energy plants, a cutting-edge offshore platform. In other words, you start with an intelligent, living design, and then build its real-world counterpart.

But let’s imagine instead that you just acquired a 20-year-old bottling plant, or you operate a 50-year-old refinery in need of modernization, or an 80-year-old power plant with urgent decarbonization goals. After decades of operation—various expansions, modifications, changes in management, updated designs, lost records—your engineering information may have become, let’s say, a little spotty.

With incomplete or outdated as-built engineering documentation, what’s your path to a digital twin? How, in other words, do you take an existing asset and turn it into an intelligent, living design? This is where laser scanning enters the picture.

How the market is changing

Laser scanning is a method of measuring physical objects—equipment, factories, even entire environments—with great speed and precision. It works by pulsing laser beams at surfaces and measuring the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the scanner (time-of-flight). The result is a point cloud, a dense collection of 3D data points, each including x, y, and z coordinates, which, together, form a highly accurate digital representation of the scanned object.

In 2020, the market size for laser scanning technology surpassed $3 billion; by 2030, experts forecast the market will grow to $16.66 billion.^[1] Fueling that growth is a number of ongoing trends. For one, the technology is maturing, becoming more powerful, user-friendly, and affordable. At the same time, the need to modernize and decarbonize existing infrastructure, industrial plants, and other structures is only becoming more pressing. To bring these existing assets into the digital age, you’ll need a laser scanner.

In 2020, the market size for laser scanning technology surpassed $3 billion; by 2030, experts forecast the market will grow to $16.66 billion.^[2]

New possibilities for the future of laser scanning

But what we’ll explore in this blog are advances in adjacent technologies, and how they are unlocking new possibilities for the future of laser scanning, broadening its applications and its impact.

1. Portable laser scanners expand industrial applications

One of the reasons laser scanning is becoming more affordable is it’s also becoming smaller, but miniaturization improves more than price-point; smaller hardware is opening the door to innovative new applications that solve new challenges, and greatly improve accessibility and user-friendliness.

Whereas early laser scanners once required heavy machinery just to move, today we see handheld scanners, body-mounted scanners, such as NavVis’s wearable mobile mapping systems, and especially drone-mounted scanners.

AP Consultoria e Projetos, for example, the Brazilian engineering and design company, uses drones to rapidly scan existing plants in order to better model, design, and deliver complex brownfield projects. It also enables the company to survey hard-to-reach and dangerous locations without placing field surveyors at risk. In fact, the company has reduced the field survey teams it deploys to a given project by as much as 50-90%, all while reducing project delivery time by 49%.

2. Cloud-based data management platforms

For large projects, point clouds commonly measure in the terabytes, which poses a few challenges. Storing them can place significant strain on on-site IT infrastructure; they require powerful on-premises hardware for processing; and sharing these enormous datasets by traditional means has its own troubles. Project teams must trade portable hard drives between stakeholders, making for a cumbersome, less-than-secure workflow.

Cloud-based data management and collaboration platforms remove the need for expensive on-premises servers and hardware in favor of pay-as-you-go access to scalable cloud storage and software services, which lowers the barrier to entry for small and medium-sized companies. These platforms also unlock a new level of collaboration by ensuring that all stakeholders have real-time access to the same, up-to-date data in the cloud.

The Germany-based chemicals company, Wacker Chemie, for example, relies on a cloud-based engineering hub to give its dispersed teams and external contractors real-time access to the same laser-scan datasets so that, wherever they’re working, they can always work together, clash-free.

3. Virtual and augmented reality applications

Experts expect the growing demand for virtual and augmented reality technology will create an even greater demand for laser scanning.^[3] After all, VR and AR visualization capabilities are only as good as the 3D data models they visualize.

By combining high-fidelity 3D models with powerful VR solutions, engineers and designers can (virtually) step right into the models they’re designing, improving decision-making, and offering a clearer, more compelling way to convey design information to stakeholders.

In the industrial sector, another obvious VR and laser scanning application is operator training, which is already gaining steam. BASF, another leading Germany-based chemicals company, uses VR to train new apprentices. With 50% of its operators due to retire within ten years, the company needed a more scalable way to prepare the next generation of BASF operators. Now, with a solution that combines a digital twin with immersive VR, BASF trains more than 300 new operators a year.

4. Artificial intelligence

Because point clouds are so large, processing these datasets is an especially costly, time-consuming, and error-prone task in any laser-scanning project, requiring many engineering hours of effort.^[4] Already, AI is beginning to ease this burden.^[5]

Processing, or interpreting, a point cloud involves a number of subtasks: segmentation, object detection and classification, feature extraction, as well as filtering for errors and noise—unwanted or irrelevant data. Experts expect AI to streamline this process by automating these tasks, saving time, improving accuracy, and avoiding costly errors and rework.^[6] Of course, as AI continues to advance, we’re likely to see even more transformational innovations in this space.

A look ahead

Where will all these technology trends converge? Will we see the day when autonomous drones, powered by AI, scan entire facilities, process the data in real-time, and deliver fully realized digital twins straight to your VR headset—all without a single human hand in the process? We better not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

What we can say for certain is that as laser scanning continues to grow more advanced, more accessible, and more varied in its applications, it will play an increasingly pivotal role in the future of Industry 4.0.

^{[1] Allied Market Research. (2020, February). 3D Scanning Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report, by Type, Services, Range and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030. Allied Market Research. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/3D-scanning-market
[2] Allied Market Research. (2020, February). 3D Scanning Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report, by Type, Services, Range and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030. Allied Market Research. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/3D-scanning-market
[3] Allied Market Research. (2020, February). 3D Scanning Market Size, Share, Competitive Landscape and Trend Analysis Report, by Type, Services, Range and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030. Allied Market Research. https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/3D-scanning-market
[4] Mirzaei, K., Arashpour, M., Asadi, E., Masoumi, H., Bai, Y., & Behnood, A. (2022). 3D point cloud data processing with machine learning for construction and infrastructure applications: A comprehensive review. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 51, 101501. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1474034621002500
[5] BIM Learning Center. (n.d.). An inside look at laser scanning advances and trends. Retrieved January 9, 2025, from https://bimlearningcenter.com/an-inside-look-at-laser-scanning-advances-and-trends/
[6] McNeil Engineering. (n.d.). Future of laser scanning: Advancements and trends in the industry. Retrieved January 9, 2025, from https://www.mcneilengineering.com/future-of-laser-scanning-advancements-and-trends-in-the-industry/}