3D Artifact Scanning — Museo Evita

While we were building the digital twin of Palacio Ferreyra, we noticed something we hadn't planned for: visitors cared about the moldings, the ironwork and the great branching cast-iron staircase as much as about the art on the walls. It makes sense — when the palace was built, every piece of hardware was commissioned to order from a craftsman, because there was no shop to buy it from. All that loaded detail made us wonder whether we could capture those pieces in 3D and add them to the tour as things you could pick up and turn around.

The aim was to break the usual distance between visitor and object. Not a photo of a staircase railing, but a model you could rotate and inspect. And to do it with gear practical enough to use inside a working museum, on fragile or immovable pieces.

We scanned with the LiDAR sensor on an iPhone — at the time, the one accessible option that gave usable depth data. We also tried photogrammetry from high-quality photos alone, but without depth information the results were poor; with LiDAR the quality jumped noticeably. The technique was simple to describe and slow to do well: circle the object with the camera across a full sphere of angles, taking as many photos as possible from as many positions as possible. The resulting models went straight into the digital twin as one more interactive layer.

The sensor has hard limits. Transparent and highly reflective materials — glass, acrylic, polished metal — throw off the depth reading and the model breaks; those objects we simply took off the list. Space was the other constraint: an object against a wall can't be circled, and anything fragile, heavy or in storage dragged along paperwork and handling rules that slowed everything down. Because the project came up mid-scan, we couldn't agree on an object list in advance either; we chose pieces by how much each one taught us about what can and can't be scanned.

The scanned pieces live inside the Museo Evita twin as an extra layer of interactivity. The most valuable thing was the principle left behind: people connect with the details, not just the masterpieces. That idea carried into every project that came after.