3D Scanning in Palo Alto, CA

Much of Palo Alto's commercial scanning work is in Stanford Research Park. The park was authorized in 1951 and now covers about 700 acres along Page Mill Road; as of 2018 it held 140 buildings and about 10 million square feet, and its tenants include HP, Broadcom, and SAP, with Tesla its largest tenant as of late 2025. Stanford's main campus itself is mostly in unincorporated Santa Clara County, but the research park and the Stanford Shopping Center lie inside Palo Alto city limits. Research and lab buildings turn over constantly. An office floor becomes a wet lab, a lab gets new fume hoods and exhaust, a high bay gets new equipment, and every one of those changes has to fit around existing structure, shafts, and ceiling space. A scan records walls, columns, overhead ducts, pipe, and tray in one visit, and we deliver plans, sections, and 3D linework of the runs the engineers need.

The residential and downtown work leans historic. Professorville, a National Register district since 1980, is known for brown-shingle houses with gambrel roofs and for Colonial Revival and Craftsman homes, and the HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue sits nearby. Downtown, the Ramona Street Architectural District between University and Hamilton avenues, listed in 1986, holds Spanish Colonial Revival buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, including Birge Clark's 1928 Medico-Dental Building. At the other end of the timeline, Joseph Eichler built almost 3,000 homes in Palo Alto. Renovations, basement additions, and second units on houses of every era begin with measured existing conditions, and a scan captures interiors, facades, and rooflines without touching historic fabric.

Contour Survey is based in Lotus, El Dorado County, and works across the Bay Area. We set primary GNSS control, carry secondary control with a Trimble S3, tie every Trimble X9 setup to it, and process in Trimble Business Center in US survey feet, with control held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control. The report states the control basis and the accuracy achieved. Deliverables are a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, and coded points your team can model from. See 3D laser scanning, as-built surveys, scanning in San Mateo, and our Palo Alto surveying page.