I built a free browser game called Reality Capture Game, published on unsurveyed.xyz, that puts players inside the daily workflow of a terrestrial laser scanning specialist, using the Leica RTC360 as its narrative anchor. It started as a way to explain my own job to people who have never stood behind a scanner on a tripod, and it turned into something a little sillier and more personal than a straight simulator: a game that teaches real scanning trade-offs while also asking you to scan a haunted house or a sinking ocean liner.
From Job Site to Game Engine
I currently work with Leica Geosystems, where I’ve spent more than 13 years promoting reality capture technology, and I write about the related hardware and software on my site, unsurveyed.xyz. I also run more than 20 training sessions a year for clients and partners, and I keep hearing the same handful of questions from people who are new to scanning:
- Can the scanner see through walls or clothes?
- Can I combine scans taken in different rooms or even different buildings?
- Can you scan me?
- What actually decides whether the coverage and the registration turn out well?
Reality Capture Game grew out of wanting a simple way to show the answers instead of just explaining them again.
Teaching Scanner Placement Through Play
The game actually started as a much simpler tool: a little simulator where a laser spreads out from your cursor and collides with rectangles standing in for walls. That alone was enough to show a newcomer the first big lesson — the beam gets blocked by walls, so you have to think about where you put the scanner if you want it to actually see the things you need. But that’s only half the problem. The other half is registration: to stitch two scans together well, you generally want at least 30% overlap between them, so I built that limit into the simulator too — place a new station too far from the last one and there simply isn’t enough overlap to work with.
That solved the two core problems, but it opened a new one: nothing stopped a user from mindlessly dropping stations everywhere just to guarantee overlap and coverage. In real life we want the opposite — finish the field work as fast as possible and get back to the office with a coffee to start processing. So we minimize the number of setups while still hitting the overlap and coverage we need. I decided to penalize the player for excessive stations for the same reason: in the real world, we don’t place a scanner just anywhere, we follow a logic. That’s the moment the idea for turning the simulator into an actual game, with points and rules built around these same principles, was born.
Making Scan Quality Visible
I didn’t want to explain scanner parameters with sliders and numbers, so I tried to make them visible instead. Every setup lights up a bright, detailed zone close to the scanner, which fades into a thinner, noisier halo further out — close to how a real point cloud stays sharp near the instrument and gets sparser and grainier the further it reaches. You don’t read a range spec; you can just see where your coverage is genuinely good and where it’s stretched thin.
Turning Registration Into a Game
I didn’t want registration to stay invisible either. Sometimes, when two scans need to be tied together, it has to be done manually. In real life we have tools like VIS and Auto-Cloud that can perform automatic cloud registration, but manual adjustments are still sometimes required, and the game tries to simulate this: it drops you into a little alignment puzzle: two point clouds, one fixed and one movable, that you drag and rotate into place while an error value ticks in real time. Get it tight enough before the timer runs out and the stations snap together; stall too long and you fail the link. It’s a playful, simplified stand-in for manual cloud-to-cloud alignment, but it gets across the one thing I most wanted players to feel — that a clean registration is something you earn with a steady hand, not something that just happens.
Incorporating Real-World Conditions
The more I worked on the game, the more I wanted to bring real on-site distractions and tasks into it, so a newcomer gets some idea of what might actually happen during a job. Some of those are things you can influence, good or bad. The client chat is a good example: the client in the game is usually just as new to all this as the player once was, and asks the exact same questions I hear in my own trainings — the ones I mentioned above. Answer the way you’d actually explain it on site and you’re rewarded; deflect or joke your way through it and the game penalizes you.
Other things are simply out of your hands, the way they are on a real job, so I added a bit of randomness for that: the game rolls a dice and leaves the outcome to luck and the blessing of the reality capture god. The power might unexpectedly cut out in the office, for instance, and all you can do is hope the project autosaved in time.
The game also incorporates mechanics that mirror real-world asset management and documentation, such as collecting scattered geotags. Additionally, players might face random georeferencing challenges, requiring them to match data provided by the surveyor with the foreman’s materials. Just like the procedural level generation, these events happen unpredictably—reflecting the true nature of being on site. Anyone who operates a scanner knows the classic scenario: a curious bystander walks up, asks what you’re filming, and blocks the laser. I built this exact crowd interference mechanic into the game, complete with a “shout” button to scatter people and clear your line of sight. One customer even joked that he wishes he had that exact button in real life.
A Reality Capture Game with Personality
As a kid of the 90s and 2000s, I also wanted to weave in references to the movies, shows, and video games I grew up with. In fact, several entire levels are built around these tributes—you’ll find yourself scanning a familiar sitcom coffee shop, a sinking ocean liner, or pulling off a silent night-vision heist, plus a few other surprises I won’t spoil. These specific levels aren’t meant to be rigorous technical simulations; they’re simply what happens when you let a scanning nerd design a game.
It’s a Game, After All
The game’s strength, I’d argue, is that it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. It’s not a certified training platform or a literal Reality Capture simulator, and I think it’s better for staying in its lane. It works best as an outreach tool — for students, GIS-adjacent hobbyists, or anyone curious why reality capture projects take the shape and the time that they do.
Its limits follow from that same modest scope. It currently models one scanner and one workflow, so it can’t speak to mobile mapping or aerial lidar. It’s built for mouse and keyboard on desktop only, with no mobile support, and its mechanics are simplified enough that they should be read as an analogy for field judgment rather than a substitute for real training on real equipment.
It runs entirely in a browser, packed into a single HTML file under one megabyte, with no external art assets — everything you see is drawn live on an HTML5 canvas, so it loads instantly with nothing to install. No downloads, no registrations.
Key Features of Reality Capture Game
- Reality Capture Game turns the core trade-off of terrestrial scanning — setup count versus coverage completeness — into a scoring system you feel in-game rather than a written explanation.
- Scan quality and range are shown as something you can see on screen, not tuned through numeric settings — a simple idea that could work just as well in real training materials.
- A hands-on cloud-to-cloud alignment puzzle and a chat full of workflow trivia turn registration and client management into things you practice rather than watch happen.
- The tone throughout is deliberately light — the game is free, self-contained, and best treated as a fun way in for students and newcomers rather than certified training.
Try It
Reality Capture Game is free to play in a desktop browser at https://www.unsurveyed.xyz/main-page/reality-capture-game
Author Bio
Aleksandr Solopov is a reality capture specialist at Leica Geosystems, based in Dubai, UAE, where he is in charge of the Middle East region, working with terrestrial and mobile scanning systems, including the Leica RTC360, Leica BLK360, and Pegasus TRK. He builds automation tools and scripting workflows for reality capture solutions and documents them, along with hardware reviews and field tutorials, on his personal blog, unsurveyed.xyz. Reality Capture Game is his effort to translate the daily decisions of scanning fieldwork into an accessible, playable format.
Company / organization: Leica Geosystems
Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UNSURVEYED/videos
Website: https://unsurveyed.xyz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solopov-aleksandr/
