TEBO 1, The Technology: LiDAR & Visualskies

The First Mission · Find

Drag to strip away the forest, and reveal the caves below.

Aerial LiDAR sees through the rainforest canopy to the bare limestone, surfacing the dark mouths of caves no one has entered.

Aerial LiDAR bare-earth scan of the karst with natural cave openings revealed

The same karst landscape under unbroken rainforest canopy

Forest canopyLiDAR · caves revealed

DJI M600 · LiDAR

Possible cave

An octocopter drone flies a survey grid above the rainforest, pulsing a laser hundreds of thousands of times a second. Enough pulses slip through gaps in the leaves to reach the ground and bounce back, and from those returns we rebuild the bare earth beneath the canopy, exposing the limestone and the dark mouths of caves no one has entered. Drag the drone to peel back the forest.

The same precision works inside the cave, bringing faint or weathered rock art back into view, so each expedition can find the next chapter of Tebo 1's story.

Concept visualization, LiDAR flags potential cave openings (highlighted), including a string of them along the cliffs east of the river.

Explorers with headlamps operating a LiDAR scanner in a vast cave

In the Field

Recorded entirely by light, the site left untouched.

Capture protocols developed for fragile cave environments mean the entire site is recorded without a finger laid on the art or the burial, light alone.

The Second Mission · Rebuild

From points of light to a living world.

Inside Liang Tebo, LiDAR captures the geometry to the millimetre while photogrammetry captures true color and texture. Fused, they become a point cloud, then a textured digital twin, the exact foundation onto which the CGI world of 31,000 years ago is rebuilt.

LiDAR and photogrammetry capture inside the cave — 01 · CaptureLiDAR + photogrammetry, on the cave wall

Colored point cloud of the cave chamber — 02 · Point cloudMillimetre-accurate, fully colored

Textured 3D digital-twin mesh of the cave — 03 · Digital twinMesh → photoreal, in Unreal Engine

The scan reborn as a CGI reconstruction — 04 · Scan becomes worldThe data, brought to life

A Rare Pairing

Where expedition science meets Hollywood.

That base layer is where Visualskies goes to work. The same studio delivers feature VFX for Napoleon, House of the Dragon, and Project Hail Mary, and brings that craft to Liang Tebo, lifting a raw field scan into a feature-grade virtual world. It is the rare crossover TEBO 1 needs: a team fluent in both extreme-environment fieldwork and blockbuster CGI, able to turn a real cave into a world an audience can step inside.

5 yrs

On Lost Cities w/ Albert Lin

1M+

3D scans captured

100+

Productions delivered

Nations worked in

Lost Cities with Albert LinNapoleonHouse of the DragonProject Hail MaryDisneyAppleMarvelNational GeographicWarner BrosNetflix

Be Part of It

Help turn a vanishing cave into a world that endures.

The November 2026 expedition will create the first ultra-photorealistic archive of Liang Tebo and the Tondoyan massif. We're seeking partners in immersive technology, science, and conservation.

Become a partner Back to the project

Forged in the Field

Drag to strip away the forest, and reveal the caves below.

Recorded entirely by light, the site left untouched.

From points of light to a living world.

Tebo 1's world, rebuilt from light.

Where expedition science meets Hollywood.