HOW EARTH OBSERVATION TECHNOLOGY BECAME A VIDEO GAME STUDIO


Davide Colangelo, CEO, (left) and Adriano Bizzoco, Game Director at Digital Lighthouse Studios, on how a remote sensing research project became an entertainment company — and why its first video game is set in a UNESCO World Heritage site


T


he technology at the heart of our first video game was not built for entertainment. It was built to monitor the surface of the Earth. Digital Lighthouse began in 2013 as a research


and development project inside Geocart, an Italian company specialising in Earth observation and remote sensing. The objective was to develop a methodology for digitising any real location in 3D, using high- resolution photogrammetry with aerial and terrestrial laser scanning, with enough accuracy to meet the demands of film visual effects and game environments. The results were so strong that in 2015 the project was spun out as a company in its own right. Founding that company in the south of Italy came at a cost. There was


no production ecosystem to draw on and no suppliers to lean on. The answer was vertical integration: owning the equipment, running every stage of production internally, and attracting specialists from across the country to somewhere they would not otherwise have come. Digital Lighthouse Studios today runs a production hub of some 3,000


square metres, comprising virtual production stages, motion capture, body and object scanning, post-production suites and a render farm. We have been the official media partner for the Racing Bulls Formula 1 team, and have worked with Red Bull, Lamborghini, Armani, AC Milan, Enel and the Presidency of the Italian Republic, across advertising, documentary, experiential installations and simulation. Games are where that trajectory leads. Digital Lighthouse Games,


the internal game development division, is combining exploration and stealth with environmental puzzles with its first-person psychological horror-adventure made in Unreal Engine 5.. But we did not have everything a game demands. We have always


been held to exacting standards, but signing off a finished deliverable is not the same as testing a system that must survive hours with a player who ignores your intentions. That discipline we built from passion, as we built the studio itself. What’s special is the coming together of data and the people who


interpret it. A laser scan point cloud is only raw material. What gives it meaning is the environment artist deciding which details carry a story,


42 | MCV/DEVELOP September/October 2026


the lighting artist making a space feel occupied or abandoned, the sound designer next door, the motion capture stage down the corridor. Because it all sits under one roof, that exchange runs continuously. The game is set in Matera, in Basilicata, a


UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements — or rather in a version of it, one marred by


environmental catastrophe. The location stems from the studio’s own research: the project originates in a historical and scientific study with the University of Basilicata, the National Research Council, and the UNESCO Youth Committee. It extends beyond the city, into the network beneath it and the surrounding countryside, environments not built from field-acquired data but grounded in the documented architecture and landscape of those places. None of it would have been possible without the formal support of


local institutions, and the municipality of Matera in particular. Working in a protected site of that significance carries real obligations and needs public bodies willing to engage with unfamiliar formats. When they are attentive to new technologies and new languages, video games become a legitimate way to speak about an area and reach an audience that conventional cultural promotion rarely touches.


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