Coastal Erosion Monitoring

I developed this web app during the first quarter of 2023 as a presentation aid for the Natural Disaster Expo my company attended. My partner Kyle Maulucci and I drove out to Rodanthe NC three separate times to document the change in sand erosion and beach nourishment efforts. I created a replicable automated flight route using DJI Terra, allowing us to take the same series of roughly 1000 photos of this stretch of beach. Using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2 and a Sony A7iii handheld mirrorless camera, I took photos from every angle of the beach-front properties.

After the data had been collected, I edited the photos in Adobe Lightroom to correct for color and lens distortion before rendering each photo set into a separate 3D model using Reality Capture. I decimated each of the models from about 300M polygons to 100K polygons and kept the 4K textures. This optimized the models for an experience that could load in a web browser, and I used 3D design software to write the logic and UI to navigate between each model. The result is the web app you can explore in the embedded window on the right.