Given a proposal for a new building in a city like Edinburgh, they can also create virtual realities, almost microscopically accurate, so viewers might see what the building looks like from all angles in the place where it’s intended to go, including the shadows it might cast at different times of day.

The technology isn’t brand new or unique to Scotland, but the Glasgow team is on its cultural front line. Douglas Pritchard, a Canadian-born architect by training, is the wizard behind the Digital Design Studio at the art school. He heads the Scottish laser expedition with David Mitchell, director of Historic Scotland’s Technical Conservation Group. Describing how fast laser modeling has progressed and how far it might soon go, Mr. Pritchard said, “We’re no longer a million miles from the ‘Star Trek’ holodeck.”

He was perfectly serious.

The cultural implications of the technology are big, as are the political ones for Scotland, which, via the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, has latched on to the laser team’s work.

It was about three years ago that Mr. Pritchard’s art school group began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes. They caught the attention of Mr. Mitchell, who enlisted Mr. Pritchard to scan a decaying iron bridge in Dundee, which was nearly impossible to survey with much accuracy except by laser. The bridge project led to scans of Stirling Castle and Rosslyn Chapel, the 15th-century Gothic fancy to which “The Da Vinci Code” has lately brought swarms of conspiracy-minded tourists. One of them was a man who tried one day to take a sledgehammer to the so-called Apprentice Pillar, convinced that the Holy Grail was hidden inside it.

No harm done, but the event illustrated, as Mr. Mitchell noted, why scans are necessary. “Remember Windsor?” he asked, referring to the fire in 1992 that burned parts of the British royal castle. “If restorers had had laser scans back then, they could have rebuilt everything to within three millimeters of accuracy, but instead they had to rely on conjecture from photographs.” He noted the more recent case of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up in 2001.