Mohanpura is one of the oldest areas in Rawalpindi, Pakistan— an example of pre-partition Punjabi urban architecture that has survived for over a hundred years. It is also vanishing. Much like other heritage buildings in the area, it is mostly remembered and known from occasional photographs rather than having a detailed spatial record. Once a building such as this has been lost, there is generally nothing left from which it can be reconstructed. This is the gap that a recent capture project has aimed to fill.
Why This Kind of Site Is Hard to Document the Usual Way
The problem of physical decay is clear, but the lack of documentation is just as significant. Since most historic urban areas such as Mohanpura were never surveyed according to any modern spatial standards, there is nothing to rely on when deterioration begins to speed up. Drone-based mapping, which is the usual method for large-site surveys, is not really suitable for such cases either — an orthomosaic taken from above gives very little information about the detail of a building's facade, its interior arrangement, or the narrow, cramped streets typical of old city quarters. A completely different method of capturing the site was therefore needed.
Why Matterport Specifically Fit This Project
The ground-based capture technique used by Matterport was designed specifically for this kind of situation: it is suitable for walkable interior spaces, narrow urban corridors, and for capturing architectural details that cannot be resolved by aerial imaging. Instead of creating a mosaic of top-down images, it generates a 3D space that can be navigated together with a point cloud — something that is truly useful for heritage documentation, since the objective goes beyond simply asking "what does this look like from above" to also being "what does it feel like to walk through the space and what does it actually look like up close".
The Mohanpura Project Itself
The capture included an area of 304 square metres in the neighbourhood, using only Matterport and not involving any drone or aerial element since a ground-based method capable of interior documentation was the appropriate one for the kind of recording required here. The result was a walkable 3D digital twin together with a point cloud, providing a permanent and explorable record of a space which may not still exist in its present form for long. You can see the full capture here.
Why This Matters Beyond One Street
Reality capture is mostly discussed in connection with construction, the energy sector, and infrastructure — for example, in the areas of progress tracking, as-built verification, and asset inspection. However, the use of the technology for heritage and cultural preservation is genuinely not fully exploited, and it might be argued that in this case the stakes are higher in a particular sense: if something is missed at a construction site it can be resurveyed next month, but if a building that is over a century old collapses or is demolished it is lost forever. A digital twin created before this happens is often the only complete record that will ever exist.
A Timely Tie-In
Reality Capturing and digital twins are also going to be the main topics at this year's INTERGEO 2026, which is taking place in Munich this week—being one of the biggest events in the geospatial industry. It's a useful reminder that some of the most interesting applications of this technology are not confined to the industrial uses with which it is normally linked. In certain cases, the most valuable capture project involves 304 square metres of a street that won't look the same in another decade.
Whether or not you are working on a reality capture project—be it in the field of heritage, industry, or otherwise—the main takeaway from Mohanpura is that you should select the capture method according to what actually needs to be documented, not simply because it is the method most commonly employed for that type of site.
