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Consultant demonstrates digital "smart twin" capture of Grand Island High School and town assets
Summary
Arc Strategic founder Chris Yelena demonstrated a 3-D mapping and "smart digital twin" platform that the company says can digitize Grand Island assets (including Grand Island High School) for security, emergency response, asset management and planning. Board members asked follow-up questions and agreed to meet with town staff to explore the idea.
Chris Yelena, founder of Arc Strategic, told the Grand Island Town Board that his company digitally captured Grand Island High School and can create an interactive 3-D model and "smart digital twin" of town-owned buildings and public assets.
In a presentation, Yelena described a platform that combines drone imagery, interior lidar scans and AI-driven annotations to produce a shareable model with measured accuracy. "We digitally capture Grand Island High School with a partner of ours," he said, and added that the firm's capture produced about 3,300 drone images and a 3-D model of a building the company described as roughly 300,000 square feet. He said exterior drone resolution is roughly a half-inch and interior scans can reach near-millimeter detail in measured features.
Why it matters: Yelena said the model can be used for school security and first-responder planning, asset inventory for insurance claims, facilities maintenance and public-works measurement. He demonstrated search features (for example, locating Narcan or a specific boiler in the building and surfacing user manuals) and said the platform can generate measurements, counts of fire extinguishers and other tagged assets.
Board members asked how first responders would access the data in an emergency. Yelena said the tool is distributed by secure links to authorized users; in other municipalities, dispatch and operations centers create link collections so responding officers and crews can quickly open the model on phones or tablets. The company said licensing is subscription-based and that customers retain raw capture data if they do not renew the hosted service ("you get back the ingredients," Yelena said).
Town officials asked about update frequency and costs. Yelena said update cadence can be set by the town: some infrastructure items need infrequent re-capture (years), while internal room changes might require more frequent edits or partial rescans. He said the platform performs rendering on the server side so it can be used on phones, tablets or modest desktop hardware.
The board concluded the demo by asking staff to follow up with Aaron (the town contact who helped arrange the capture) and to schedule a workshop to review potential use cases. "I think we're gonna have to meet with Aaron to talk about this some more and maybe figure out what we think," a board member said.
