Historic buildings hold significant cultural value and their repair and protection require diverse approaches. With the advent of 3D digitalization, drones have gained significance in heritage studies. This research focuses on applying digital methods for restoring architectural heritage. It utilizes non-contact measurement technology, specifically unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for data collection, creating 3D point cloud models using heritage building information modeling (HBIM), and employing virtual reality (VR) for architectural heritage restoration. Employing the “close + surround” oblique photography technique combined with image matching, computer vision, and other technologies, a detailed and comprehensive 3D model of the real scene can be constructed. It provides crucial data support for subsequent protection research and transformation efforts. Using the case of the Santo Stefano Church in Volterra, Italy, an idealized reconstructed 3D model database was established after data collection to preserve essential resources such as the original spatial data and relationships of architectural sites. Through the analysis of relevant historical data and the implementation of VR, the idealized and original appearance of the case was authentically restored. As a result, in the virtual simulation space, the building’s style was realistically displayed with an immersive experience. This approach not only safeguards cultural heritage but also enhances the city’s image and promotes tourism resources, catering to the diverse needs of tourists.

Historical villages bear historical, cultural, architectural, aesthetic, and landscape values, but they are facing a series of dangers and problems during the process of urbanization. Digital survey for traditional villages plays a crucial role in the preservation, planning, and development of this kind of heritage. The introduction of the terrestrial laser scanning technique is essential for heritage surveying, mapping, and modeling due to its advantages of noncontact measurement, accurate sensing of complex objects, and efficient operation. In recent years, TLS and related processing software (“SCENE”) have been widely presented as effective techniques for dealing with the management and protection of historical buildings in Fenghuang village. Thus, this paper highlights the process of using laser scanning to obtain architectural data, process point clouds, and compare the characteristics of historical buildings in Fenghuang village. The cloud-to-cloud registration technique is applied to build point clouds. As a result of model construction, some architectural patterns are summarized in this village, such as the spatial sequence of ancestral halls, the dominant position of memorial halls, and the character of building decorations and roof slopes. Furthermore, a BIM model is also explained to fulfill the statistical function for architectural components. In the future, more research can be fulfilled based on the built point cloud model, which will be beneficial for the development of the whole village.

Urban parks provide important environmental, social, and economic benefits to people and urban areas. The literature demonstrates that proximity to urban parks is one of the key factors influencing people’s willingness to use them. Therefore, the provision of urban parks near residential areas and workplaces is one of the key factors influencing quality of life. This study designed a solution based on the spatial association between urban parks and buildings where people live or work to identify whether people in different buildings have nearby urban parks available for their daily lives. A building density map based on building floor area (BFA) was used to illustrate the spatial distribution of urban parks and five indices were designed to measure the scales, service coverage and potential service loads of urban parks and reveal areas lacking urban park services in an acceptable walking distance. With such solution, we investigated the provision of urban parks in ten districts of Shenzhen in China, which has grown from several small villages to a megacity in only 30 years. The results indicate that the spatial provision of urban parks in Shenzhen is not sufficient since people in about 65% of the buildings cannot access urban parks by walking 10-min. The distribution and service coverage of the existing urban parks is not balanced at the district level. In some districts, the existing urban parks have good numbers of potential users and even have large service loads, while in some districts, the building densities surrounding the existing parks are quite low and at the same time there is no urban parks nearby some high-density areas.