We took part in the Spain Smart Water Summit 2025, Spain’s leading event dedicated to the digitalization and smart management of the urban water cycle. During the event, held in Madrid, we presented 3D Photo Survey, our cutting-edge application that enables digital surveying of utility excavation sites directly from a smartphone, using only the images captured on-site with the device’s camera.
Thanks to the technology developed by Arcoda, on-site surveys become accessible to anyone and can be completed within minutes. A true enabler for distribution utilities, allowing them to integrate three-dimensional digital models of their networks into numerous operational contexts—radically transforming processes while increasing efficiency, accuracy, and speed of intervention.
3D Photo Survey is not exclusively designed for utility excavations. This powerful app for carrying out three-dimensional surveys with your smartphone can in fact be used to acquire information on surfaces and above-ground objects. A concrete example is the three-dimensional survey of infrastructure such as electrical substations and gas reduction units.
Why 3D Photo Survey to obtain these 3D models?
Having an accurate, georeferenced and oriented model is extremely useful for digitally surveying all owned infrastructures and monitoring their characteristics. 3D models processed by 3D Photo Survey allow measurements to be taken directly from the back-office, often without having to send technical staff to the site.
Adopting systems such as 3D Photo Survey constitutes a significant time and cost saving and accelerates the enrichment and maintenance of the company’s database.
Congratulations to our colleague Lorenzo Orlandi, who has successfully completed his PhD in Industrial Innovation at the University of Trento, culminating a journey that began in 2021 within the MMLab (Multimedia Signal Processing and Understanding Lab) research group of the university’s Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science.
Lorenzo’s research focused on the development of digital 3D models based on the acquisition of real-world scenarios and their application through extended reality.
His final thesis, titled “How the blend of physical and digital worlds is reshaping the industrial field”, analyzes the challenges posed by the integration of digital and physical worlds, with a specific focus on the application domain of Arcoda.
From Lorenzo’s extensive research efforts and with the support and expertise of the Arcoda team, 3D Photo Survey was born—an innovative system that revolutionizes key processes in distribution network management.
This technology enables the automatic generation of precise, realistic, and georeferenced 3D models of underground network excavation sites, using only a smartphone paired with a compact differential correction GPS receiver.
The resulting 3D models, viewable in augmented reality even after excavations are closed, streamline the management, traceability, maintenance, and safety of network infrastructure while reducing operational time and costs.
Once again, congratulations to Lorenzo for this remarkable achievement and for successfully translating academic research into tangible advancements in utility processes!
