The key to rebuilding Notre Dame in the wake of a devastating* fire could rely on a perfectly mapped digital copy created by using laser technology.

In 2015, the late architect Andrew Tallon — who died last year of brain cancer at the age of 49 — successfully and painstakingly captured every detail of Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral by employing a mix of laser technology and digital photography.

Using more than 1 billion points of data, Tallon was able to bring the cathedral to life in what is the most accurate rendering* of the building ever made.

Specifically, Tallon used a rotating laser machine to measure exact 3-D specifications of the interior and exterior of the church throughout more than 50 locations.

He then used panoramic* photographs of the same locations mapped by lasers to overlay aesthetic* detail, which allowed Tallon to stitch together a replica* that was not only accurate in dimension but in physical appearance.

Tallon was not the first to leverage laser technology to map medieval buildings, but in the case of Notre Dame, he was by far the most successful. A previous attempt to capture the cathedral in a digital replica resulted in the researchers’ machine literally going up in smoke, according to a National Geographic report.

Perhaps the most groundbreaking results of Tallon’s work that separate it from other digital scans of Notre Dame’s ilk is that it created not only a copy of how the building looked in the present moment, but also how it changed over time.(SD-Agencies)