Documenting British Columbia’s living world — before it changes.
An AI-augmented biodiversity capture project. Phase One imaging, LiDAR, Neural Radiance Fields, and Gaussian Splatting — built in partnership with Indigenous Nations and BCIT.
British Columbia is one of the world’s last great intact ecologies. We are not recording it.
Old-growth forests, coastal ecosystems, and traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge are vanishing faster than they’re being documented. The tools to capture them at archival fidelity now exist — high-resolution sensors, LiDAR, neural radiance fields, Gaussian splatting, machine vision. The integrated project to use them at scale, in BC, with proper Indigenous partnership and a public-facing outcome, has not yet been built.
Sources: K. Price, D. Daust & R. Holt, BC’s Old Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity (2020); BC Conservation Data Centre, 2025 Annual Data Update.
A living, open-source digital twin of British Columbia’s biosphere.
Ground Truth captures BC’s flora, fauna, and ecological systems at archival resolution — then makes that capture publicly useful as immersive experiences, educational tools, research datasets, and stories. Built in partnership with Indigenous Nations whose territories hold this knowledge, and with academic institutions like BCIT.
Document
Capture BC’s living systems at archival resolution. The data becomes the permanent record.
Experience
Immersive flagship piece for Vision Pro / Quest. Lives in a museum, gallery, or school.
Open
Dataset released open-source. Researchers, educators, and Indigenous communities build on it.
An integrated capture-to-experience pipeline.
Ground Truth began as a high-resolution photographic documentation project. Three years of advancement in generative AI, neural rendering, and computer vision have reshaped what we can build from the same source material. The capture stays grounded — real measurements of real places — the outputs are what’s new.
Built with Indigenous Nations, not about them.
BC’s biodiversity has been documented, understood, and stewarded by Indigenous peoples for millennia. Ground Truth treats this not as background context but as foundational expertise.
Free, Prior & Informed Consent protocols for any capture on traditional territory.
Co-authorship of educational and immersive deliverables with partner Nation knowledge keepers.
Compensation & credit equity for traditional ecological knowledge contributions.
Optional data sovereignty — Nations retain control over how their territorial captures are used.
Right of refusal and right to withdraw at every stage of the project.
One exploratory conversation initiated. No territorial capture begins before formal partnership agreements are signed.
Lead, institutional, and partner.
Shaharbin Aboobacker
Sixteen years as a working cinematographer. Trained at the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute. Early production-grade VR commissions in Asia for Twinings London, Samsung VR, and Facebook 360. Director of Jal Hai Toh Kal Hai, a documentary on water conservation in Rajasthan. Certified multi-rotor drone pilot. BCIT-credentialed in environmental risk assessment using UAV.
BCIT
Existing relationship via 2024 Environmental Risk Assessment using UAV micro-credential. Pathway to formal research partnership for Phase 1.
Coast Salish Nations
In dialogue. Substantive partnership development is a Phase 1 deliverable.
Research lead (capture & ML) · Indigenous Cultural Advisor
Open to all forms of partnership.
Phase 1 funding target: $650K across all sources, including grants. We are looking for the right partners, not the largest cheques.
Let’s have a 30-minute conversation.
Ground Truth is at the stage where the right early sponsor shapes the project’s direction, not just funds it. We’re talking to a small number of potential founding partners before we lock the Phase 1 scope. The conversation is exploratory and confidential.