A scuba diver swimming in the Great Barrier Reef in 1985 would have seen something completely different than a diver today. In the last few decades, thanks to factors like warming seas and pollution, more than half of the coral has died. But more subtle changes are happening so quickly–and in hard-to-reach areas all over the world–that they’re hard for researchers to track.

Until recently, studying coral meant diving down with a tape measure, calculating the size of the tip of a branch, and then trying to make some crude estimations about the rest of the reef. But now 3-D scanning is making it possible to follow detailed shifts in coral health.

“Underwater is like the Wild West,” says Sly Lee, founder of The Hydrous, a nonprofit pioneering 3-D scanning of reefs. “It’s like it’s stuck in the early 1900s–the technology used is so antiquated.”





After Lee dove with researchers using tape measures, he decided to test out reality computing instead. “People didn’t know it was possible,” he says. “Programmers are in their own world, in labs. They didn’t think reality capture underwater would work, because there are so many variables.”

It turned out that it worked. “You take a ton of pictures from a regular camera, and then the software we use is smart enough to triangulate and find where points match up,” Lee says. The software, from Autodesk, turns 200,000-plus shots of a reef into a virtual 3-D model. Right now, because the software is still in development, Autodesk does some of the processing by hand, but that should soon change.





“If you trace this technology back to when it first began, maybe around 30 years ago, and put that progress on a logarithmic curve, it’s rising exponentially,” says Lee. “Virtual reality 3-D scanning has been growing for decades, but we’re just now at the knee of the curve. It’s just now picking up.”

Robots may soon be cheap enough to take the underwater pictures, too. “Right now we’re using a diver method, and I’m physically going underwater, scanning by hand,” he says. “But we’re also seeing exponential drops in costs for robots.”