◆ MAKING THINGS · 2026-10-22

When LiDAR Can Clone Reality: Digital Twins, VR, and What Counts as Real

I scan fast-food restaurants for a living. That sentence still sounds strange to me, but it is genuinely part of what I do. I bring LiDAR equipment into real physical spaces, including quick-service restaurant interiors, and I capture them down to the millimetre. The result is a digital twin: an accurate, navigable three-dimensional clone of a place that actually exists. You can move through it on screen. You can drop it into a VR headset and walk around inside it. The booths, the counter, the ceiling tiles, the scuff marks on the floor. All of it.

The practical reasons for doing this are straightforward. If you want to redesign a space, renovate it, or test a new layout, having an exact digital copy saves you from guessing. You can previsualize changes before a single wall gets touched. You can train staff in a simulated version of a location before it opens. You can archive a space for documentation or preservation. For design and construction work, a digital twin is just a smarter way to plan. I find that part of the work genuinely satisfying, the same way I find any tight craft satisfying. You can read a bit more about how I think about making things in my bio.

But here is where it gets interesting to me, past the practical case. The better this technology gets, the more a digital copy stops feeling like a representation and starts feeling like the thing itself.

When a Copy Is Good Enough to Fool You

LiDAR scanning has gotten very good very fast. The point clouds are dense. Texture capture is sharp. When you put on a headset and step into a high-fidelity digital twin of a real place, something unusual happens. Your body starts treating it as a real place. You feel like you are somewhere. You are not looking at a picture of a room. You are standing in a room, except the room is data.

I do not want to overstate this or dress it up in neuroscience I am not qualified to explain. But I have been inside scanned spaces in VR and I have noticed something: the transition back to the physical world feels like a transition. There is a moment of reorientation. That is not nothing.

For most of history, a copy of a place was obviously a copy. A painting of a cathedral was beautiful and maybe moved you, but it was a painting. A photograph was a photograph. Even early 3D models were clearly models. The gap between the representation and the real thing was wide enough that nobody got confused. Now that gap is closing in a way that feels qualitatively different, not just technically better.

Presence, Memory, and the Strange Middle Ground

Here is something I keep turning over. A digital twin of a demolished building would let future generations walk through a space that no longer exists. That is preservation in a form we have never really had before. Not a photo archive, not a reconstruction based on drawings, but an experiential record. You could step into a neighbourhood that was torn down, a factory, a concert hall, a family home, and be spatially present in it.

That feels meaningful to me. It also feels a little eerie, and I think it should. Memory and place are deeply connected. We talk about going back to somewhere as if returning to a physical location retrieves something emotional. What happens to that when the physical location is gone but the spatial experience is perfectly preserved in a file? Does walking through the digital twin feel like being there? Does it satisfy the same part of you that wants to return? Or does it just make the absence sharper?

I genuinely do not know. I am an artist and a designer, not a philosopher. But I spend enough time inside scanned spaces to think these are real questions, not just science fiction prompts. The technology is here. These situations are going to happen.

What This Means for Making Things

From a creative and practical standpoint, the applications keep expanding. Games and entertainment studios want real-world geometry to build from. Architects and retailers want to test environments before building them. Training programs in industries like healthcare, retail, and hospitality want simulated spaces that match actual locations. The value of an accurate digital twin goes up every time a new use case appears.

For my own work, scanning spaces has sharpened the way I think about design and about what it means to represent something faithfully. There is real craft in capturing a space well, in understanding how light and geometry and texture combine to create the feeling of a place. It connects, for me, to the same instinct that drives hand-drawn animation in a world of templates: the interest in what is irreducibly real, made versus generated, captured versus approximated.

The philosophical question underneath all of this is one I keep coming back to without expecting a clean answer. If a digital twin is accurate enough that your body responds to it as a real space, if you feel presence inside it, if walking through it forms memories you can retrieve later, then what exactly is the distinction we are defending when we say it is not real? I am not saying the distinction disappears. I am saying it gets genuinely complicated, and I think that complication is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.

We are building copies of the world good enough to live in, at least briefly. That is new. And I find it equal parts exciting and worth watching carefully. If you want to see the other side of my work, the motion design and creative direction, that is all at davidzak.com.

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