It’s been six months since the war in Ukraine broke out. I was in Kyiv, the capital, on February 24 when Russian troops stormed the country. Since then, much of my work on the foreign desk has been dedicated to telling stories from a country at war and how it affects society on all levels, both in Ukraine and abroad.

During the first few weeks and months of the warm we saw a staggering number of readers at VG, with our audience reading almost everything we wrote. Now the situation is different, and we have to work a lot harder to keep our readers and challenge both the visual and textual storytelling.

That was my task when I recently returned to Bucha, Ukraine, the suburb outside Kyiv that has seen some of the worst atrocities of the war to date.

3D mapping

In Bucha, I visited local resident Vasili and his burnt-out apartment, where the damage was immense. The furniture had turned to melted plastic and burnt wood, and the walls were blackened from the fire. A Russian tank had fired into the apartment during the first days of the invasion.

After an interview and some regular still photos, I wanted to document it further because I was still not able to show the extent of the room’s damage. With an iPhone Pro, which features a lidar, I wanted to do a 3D mapping of the apartment.

A lidar sends out waves of light pulses and records the time it takes for a signal to leave the phone, bounce off a surface, and return. This technology allows it to measure the distance to the surface. The light pulses, usually lasers, are not visible to the naked eye.

In addition, the phone uses data from motion sensors and cameras to help with accuracy. The result can be used to create a quite decent 3D model even though there are far more advanced, accurate, and costly alternatives to using just an iPhone. But for me, it’s key to have a small kit that can be brought to most situations.

I had known about the feature for a long time but never used it in an editorial story. Now it seemed like a good fit, so I tried.

The process

With the 3D Scanner App, I mapped the apartment. Everyone inside the room had to leave as I used the phone to scan the floor, walls, and ceiling. I moved around in the room to get as much detail as possible and document all possible angels.

After about a minute or so, the room was mapped and I had what I needed for further development and rendering of the model. The application then stitched the model together, and I could choose to export it into other formats to make the presentation more interactive.

For the report I was making, “Summer in Bucha,” it was best used as a visual element in the story. I made the model slowly spin around so that the viewer could see the room from all sides, almost floating on the final Web page of the story.

The final report included video loops, still images, text, and the 3D model.

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