RCL Products

Tools Built for Capturing Reality

Software and hardware developed in-house to make 3D reconstruction faster, cheaper, and more repeatable.

Commercial mobile mapping systems cost tens of thousands of dollars, and most of them still hand you a proprietary file you cannot open in ArcGIS Pro. RCL Products exist because that was the wrong tradeoff for the work I actually do.

There are three tools, and each one owns a stage of the pipeline. Argus™ is the hardware: a three-camera 360° rig at fixed, repeatable heights that captures the interior spaces a drone cannot fly. Hera™ is the software that plans the walk, generates the control targets, and converts 360° footage into reconstruction-ready imagery. Iris™ covers the outside and the exit. It plans the drone flight, writes the mission file, and takes the finished model back out to a georeferenced point cloud with a measured accuracy report attached.

Argus™, Hera™, and Iris™ form the RCL Pantheon™. Together they cover the full path from an empty site to a spatial product you can open in ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, or CloudCompare. All three are in active use on a funded digital twin project at Salisbury University. All three are single-file and dependency-light. None of them require a license you have to renew.

Public release is in progress. Until then, the full capture and reconstruction workflow is available through RCL Services.

RCL Pantheon: Hera, Argus, & Iris

Hera™ an RCL product
Planning & Preprocessing for 360° Workflows

Version 2.13 (September 19th, 2026)

Hera™ v2.13 is the software companion to the Argus™ camera-rig that handles 360° video preprocessing, fiducial tag generation, and capture planning. It turns equirectangular video into reconstruction-ready imagery using FFmpeg. As a single Python file, Hera™ plans the walk before you shoot, generates the control tags you place, and extracts the resulting frames. It is currently in production use on the Salisbury University Digital Twin Initiative.

Hera™ Includes:

KapturPlan™ (Plan): A built-in capture planner for indoor and outdoor scenes. Users can draw rooms, obstacles, and doorways to receive a routed walking path, camera heights, and scale-constraint pairs. Tag spacing is solved directly from AprilTag detection limits rather than guessed, and the tool exports a printable PDF field plan.
AprilTag Generator (Tag): Creates the full tag36h11 family in vector PDF, SVG, or PNG formats at a specified physical size. The exported sheets include captions, cut marks, and optional custom branding.
Extraction and Preprocessing (Process): Converts equirectangular footage into either a cubemap or an 8-view ring with per-camera orientation and configurable field of view. It writes exact COLMAP pinhole intrinsics and uses a sharpness filter to score frames, keeping the sharpest image in each time window while dropping unusable blurred sections.

Python 3.8+, FFmpeg on PATH, no other dependencies.

Features a screen-size aware user interface that automatically adds scrollbars to fit smaller displays. Includes a built-in help system written to the ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English Issue 9 standard.

Ongoing development. Subject to change. Public release in progress.

Argus™ an RCL design

Multi-Height 360° Capture Rig

Version 2.1.3 (July 2026)

A single camera carried at chest height gives a reconstruction almost no vertical baseline, grazing-angle ceilings, and permanent blind spots under furniture. Argus™ mounts three Insta360 X4 cameras at fixed, repeatable elevations so one walk produces the vertical coverage and even image distribution that structure-from-motion depends on. Built from 3D printed parts and off-the-shelf hardware at a small fraction of the cost of a commercial mobile mapping system.

Because the elevations are fixed and known, KapturPlan™ can compute camera heights, tag placement, and walking speed before you set foot in the building.

Argus™ Includes:

Three-camera mounting at fixed top, middle, and low elevations.
3D printed hardware, field serviceable and replaceable.
Full bill of materials, assembly guide, and printable STLs.
Onshape source geometry, versioned so printed parts map to a specific release.
Designed around AprilTag control points for indoor georeferencing.

Open hardware under CC BY 4.0.

Build it, modify it, adapt it to a different camera body.

Ongoing development. Planned licensing. Subject to change. Public release in progress.

Rustin Cole Newbold presenting Inside Out at the Salisbury University 2026 Summer Research Showcase, He is holding his custom Argus camera rig.

Graphic of the Argus camera rig, created by Rusty's Creation Lab (RCL)

Iris™ an RCL product

Flight Planning, Mission Export & Georeferenced Delivery

Version 1.00 (September 19th, 2026)

Iris™ v1.00 is the debute complete drone-to-GIS toolbox that handles the entire pipeline: plan, fly, process, deliver, and verify. Part of the RCL Pantheon™ (where Argus™ captures, Hera™ converts, and Iris™ delivers) this release unifies formerly separate RCL development builds into a single workflow shell. Built around a single camera model, a shared battery model, and one unified interface, Iris™ ensures your data is accurate from the initial flight plan to the final GIS deliverable.

Iris™ Includes:

Parallax™ (Plan): A live flight geometry calculator purpose-built for the true sensor geometry of the DJI Mini 4 Pro, abandoning the generic 24 mm equivalent approximations. It handles GSD, overlap percentages, motion blur speed limits, and battery pack estimates for nadir grids, obliques, and building orbits.
Daedalus™ (Fly): A tiered photogrammetry waypoint mission generator that exports DJI-native WPML KMZ files for direct sideloading into DJI Fly. It includes footprint importing via KML, GeoJSON, or CSV, live 2D and 3D preview maps, per-tier statistics, and a rigorous preflight checklist.
SplatTrim (Process): A visual cropping tool for COLMAP points3D .bin and .txt seed files. Users can drag bounding boxes over top, front, and side point previews, or use the percentile auto-box to instantly remove far-background tie points before 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) training.
Splat to LAS (Deliver): Converts native LichtFeld Studio 3DGS PLY files into georeferenced LAS 1.2 point clouds readable by ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, and CloudCompare. Features an axis orientation preview to ensure the model is perfectly upright before export.
RMSE Report (Verify): A diagnostic tool that converts check point residuals into per-axis, horizontal, and 3D RMSE metrics with 95% confidence values following the NSSDA convention. It flags systematic bias and outliers using built-in residual scatter and bar plots.

Python 3.8+. Standard library only, no external dependencies.

Features an inline error-checking UI that validates inputs dynamically and highlights invalid fields with tooltips. Settings persist automatically in a local JSON file, and the application functions entirely offline.

Ongoing development. Subject to change. Public release in progress.