Picture the game of Quidditch in “Harry Potter,” only you’re flying around and through a real building instead of Hogwarts. That’s the kind of virtual experience 14 Mid-Pacific Institute high school students are engineering in their historical preservation class using a very new technology — 3-D laser scanning — to make a model of a very old building.

On a field trip to Kaniakapupu, King Kamehameha III’s 170-year-old summer home in Nuuanu, the students used a 3-D laser scanner to take photos of the picturesque ruins, one section at a time. Back in the classroom, using special software installed on each student’s PC laptop, they were tasked with processing the scans into 3-D digital reproductions of the entire structure.

“It’s reality capture,” said Paul Turnbull, president of the school. “The laser captures every surface it touches in a 360-degree sphere and puts it on a memory card,” he explained. “In the classroom you upload all those files and have essentially the most complicated 3-D jigsaw puzzle ever.”

The goal is “making sure that our community can retain the incredible past that’s all around us,” Turnbull added.

Mid-Pacific Institute is the first Hawaii school — and reportedly the only K-12 school worldwide — to have integrated 3-D scanning into its curriculum, said Turnbull, 47, who launched the program in a partnership with CyArk, an international nonprofit organization that digitally preserves heritage sites such as Mount Rushmore and the Tower of London. CyArk provides training to Mid-Pacific teachers, who then train their students in the technology.

A happy, creative buzz filled a Mid-Pacific classroom, its sunny windows overlooking a green Manoa ridge, as historical preservation teacher Heather Calabro, 33, circulated among her students with a friendly smile, checking their progress and offering help.

When Turnbull offered Calabro the opportunity to learn the technology, she was thrilled, she said. Not only did the technology meet the academic and community service criteria of her class, but also, in addition to researching historic Hawaii sites and artifacts that merited preservation, her students could actually be involved in preserving them.

Choosing the Honouliuli internment camp on Oahu as a historical preservation project, she applied for and received funds through the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program of the National Park Service to help the school purchase a $65,000 Faro LiDar 3-D laser scanner. In August 2014 she began teaching her first class using the scanner, with Honouliuli as the pilot project.

Because the scans document the features of an object down to a millimeter in accuracy, an architect can use them to redesign and rebuild a structure, Calabro said. In the case of Kamehameha III’s summer home, “We thought it would be a service to the community because we could preserve Kaniakapupu as it is before it deteriorates further.”

In addition, the scans could help protect the actual palace and its environment because “people can watch this file instead of going into the (protected) watershed to see Kaniakapupu,” Calabro said, adding that with the guidance of the Sierra Club, the students obtained visitor permits from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Older technology, such as pencils, paper and markers, is also used. Calabro gestured to a large whiteboard covered with drawings of a site map. Kaniakapupu was surrounded with symbols that showed the many spots where the scanner and white spherical targets (think volleyballs) would be placed around it. And when they arrived at the site, the students made sketches with pen and paper to mark where they’d taken a scan; 27 individual scans were shot at Kaniakapupu.

“We set up the scanner on its tripod, taking just one shot of one piece of the structure at a time, moving it to get all the angles. You need 20 percent of overlap between adjoining scans to make sure you have all surfaces painted with the laser,” Calabro said. The targets mark three common points, and the software enables the students to “stitch” the pictures together where the targets line up.

“The whole point of the overlap is to avoid voids,” explained senior Joshua Nichols, 17. In other words, there can’t be any puka in the final file. The goal is to make a seamless 3-D video providing a virtual fly-through experience of Kaniakapupu. “You have to set points to get a fly-through, which lets you go through doors and go under stuff,” Nichols explained.

“It’s kind of like if you had a spider web and each of the ends have to match,” said John Yen, 17, a senior.

After the scans are successfully merged, the targets are edited out.

As they worked the students traded tips and quips, with frequent smiles and laughter. At times they also vented frustration with the complex and elusive software. “It’s not user-friendly,” Calabro said.

“If the scans are uneven, we walk the student back to see where the mistake happened,” said Tony Johansen, the school’s technology specialist. “Those who make big mistakes, the next time it happens they don’t need us.”

There were also more mundane challenges, such as blocked access when the software automatically updated. “Evidently none of them remember their passwords,” Johansen said.

The students also have to develop verbal and written communications skills as a class requirement. Before a project gets the green light, they must research a site and write a persuasive essay on its significance to Hawaiian history, Calabro said.

Some students were putting the finishing touches on other projects. “It’s fun, it’s interesting because it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before,” said senior Destiny Cabrera, 17, about the technology. “And scanning artifacts is not only useful to Mid-Pac, but to the community. We scanned an old koa canoe for Hui Nalu (canoe club), and they can use it to make a new canoe.”

“I like how we get to go on a lot of field trips and see a lot of historic sites we wouldn’t see otherwise,” said senior Erin Kelly, 17. The girls described their class trip to the Niu Valley home of Hui Nalu member Rick Bauer, where the canoe rested on stands in a carport. “We had to flip the canoe, which was kind of hard, and put the scanner underneath,” Kelly said. “And there were all these dogs running around, and we had to make sure they weren’t in the scans.”

Younger Mid-Pacific students are using 3-D scanning as well: Elementary-schoolers study geometry by carving virtual pumpkins, and middle school students are scanning people. The high school freshmen and sophomores use a GoPro Freedom 360 Rig to shoot videos at the historical preservation sites.

“Because of a partnership with a virtual-reality firm in Los Angeles, we have access to GoPro’s proprietary software,” Turnbull said.

He said he’s proud that Mid-Pacific students “walk away with not only incredible digital storytelling skills, but also high-grade engineering skills in technology that’s not readily available even to some graduate schools.”

Next year they’ll be animating the technology. “That gets into gaming, augmented reality,” Turnbull said. But, he cautioned, “it’s not a toy to play with. You have to use the technology to benefit the community. That’s the most important thing.”

Other 3-D mapping projects include the coronation pavilion at Iolani Palace, Hawaii’s first printing press at the Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, and a cottage at Hawaii’s Plantation Village in Waipahu. All can be seen at midpac.edu/preservation. To see 3-D videos-in-progress of scanned projects, including Kaniakapupu, go to youtu.be/dnBVrBicjjo.