DJI Enterprise opened the 2026 World Heritage 3D Conservation Initiative on July 29, calling on surveyors and drone mapping pilots worldwide to capture heritage sites, rebuild them as 3D models, and export flythrough videos using DJI Reality. Entries close October 10.
Two tracks are open, cultural heritage and natural heritage, judged by an eight-person expert panel. DJI announces People’s Choice winners on October 15 and holds an Excellence Showcase on November 3.
The software doing the work is four months old. DJI Reality v1.0.0 shipped in April alongside DJI Terra v5.2.0 and Modify v1.6, and DroneXL covered it at the time as a free companion viewer with no license cost attached. It is now the required output format for a global contest.
DJI Reality Is The Only Accepted Output Format
Every entry must be an MP4 rendered in DJI Reality from a 3D model of the heritage subject. DJI recommends 4K at 60fps and a runtime between 30 and 300 seconds. The software accepts mesh models, 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, and point clouds.
That last part matters more than it sounds. DJI Reality arrived as the quiet third piece of an April release, and DroneXL’s coverage of Modify 1.6 at the time treated it as a viewer rather than a deliverable tool. Splatting support reached DJI Terra a year earlier, covered here when Terra added photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting in July 2025. Three months after Reality shipped, DJI built a global campaign on top of it and announced it with a launch video from DJI Enterprise.
The contest rules prohibit using AI tools to fabricate or alter either the 3D model or the video. Entrants who do lose eligibility. For a competition about synthetic reconstruction of real places, drawing that line explicitly is sharper rule-writing than most manufacturer campaigns bother with.
DJI’s initiative blog post points to two reference projects: Matrice 4E surveys of the Khumbu Icefall on Mount Qomolangma, processed into centimeter-level models in Terra that help Icefall Doctors chart safer routes, and Zenmuse L3 lidar on a Matrice 400 punching through rainforest canopy to map Maya ruins in Guatemala’s El Mirador Basin. DroneXL covered the L3’s doubled detection range when it launched last November.
The National Park Service Rules Out Most Marquee American Sites
DJI’s blog post suggests famous national parks as a subject for the natural heritage track. For every American reading it, that is the one category of site they cannot legally fly. National Park Service Policy Memorandum 14-05 has prohibited launching, landing, and operating drones on NPS-administered land since June 2014.
Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Statue of Liberty, Independence Hall: all NPS units, all closed to drone operations without written permission from the superintendent. The memo runs on the closure authority in 36 CFR 1.5, and a violation is a federal misdemeanor.
DJI has been here before, and DroneXL was the outlet that caught it. Last October this site reported that a Mavic 4 Pro promotional video carried footage from prohibited national parks and tribal lands, including Death Valley, Monument Valley, Ship Rock on Navajo Nation land, and Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring. Four days later DJI pulled the video. A spokesperson later said it had been “produced by an independent creator and not commissioned by DJI” and was removed while the company investigated internally. Ten months on, the marketing copy points at national parks again.
DJI’s contest rules push legal compliance entirely onto the participant and name no jurisdiction. That is normal contest drafting. Pairing it with promotional copy that suggests national parks is less normal, and a US operator reading the campaign page gets no signal that the obvious subjects are the illegal ones.
The workaround sits in DJI’s own category definitions. Cultural heritage explicitly includes old villages, urban landmarks, and industrial sites. Natural heritage explicitly includes the terrain in your own backyard. National Forest land, Bureau of Land Management holdings, state parks, and private sites flown with permission are all fair game, and a decaying mill complex nobody has ever scanned is a better entry than another canyon.
DJI’s Own Prize Tables Disagree, And Every Entry Carries A Perpetual License
DJI’s two published prize tables don’t agree. The contest rules page lists four People’s Choice winners; DJI Enterprise’s own blog post lists eight. Both agree on four Excellence awards. Every entrant also grants DJI a perpetual, royalty-free license to use the submitted work worldwide.
The rules page is the governing document and it is internally consistent, stating that the top four videos by engagement take the People’s Choice award. Anyone entering should assume four. Excellence winners in each category receive an Osmo Pocket 4 Standard Combo, People’s Choice winners an Osmo 360 Standard Combo.
Perpetual royalty-free licensing is boilerplate for user-generated content campaigns, so nobody should act surprised. What is worth noticing is the shape of the trade. DJI receives a distributed, judged, technically validated library of heritage reconstructions from professional surveyors in dozens of countries, built on its hardware and rendered in its software, and pays out somewhere between eight and twelve consumer cameras depending which of its pages you believe.
Entry runs through social media rather than a submission portal. Post the video, tag DJI Enterprise, add #DJIMapYourHeritage and #DJIEnterprise, and engagement decides the People’s Choice slots.
DroneXL’s Take
Two Chinese camera companies are now competing over heritage 3D, which is a strange sentence to write and a good outcome for the sites involved. Antigravity and Insta360 ran Project Eternal from April with CyArk and Splatica. DJI opened its own version weeks after that campaign wrapped.
DroneXL published Mikhail Svilanov’s Ovech Fortress splat from Project Eternal yesterday, which is how close together these two campaigns actually landed.
Here is the gap I keep coming back to. Antigravity named a heritage institution as a partner in CyArk, whose entire job is durable archiving. DJI names eight judges, including the World Monuments Fund’s Jonathan S. Bell, and no archival partner at all. Neither DJI page says where these models live after November 3, or whether any institution receives them. A digital twin that exists only as an MP4 on Instagram and a file on DJI’s servers is a marketing asset rather than a conservation archive. DJI should say which one this is.
None of that makes the campaign a bad deal for operators. A surveyor who documents a crumbling local landmark ends up with a portfolio piece, a real model, and a site record that did not exist before. Take the free software and go do the work.
But do it legally. Every year somebody decides the shot is worth the citation, and DroneXL has covered enough national park drone violations to know how those end. A federal misdemeanor and a confiscated aircraft is a terrible price for a pocket camera, and each of those incidents hands ammunition to the people writing the next round of restrictions. DJI got to delete its video and move on. A Part 107 operator cited at the Grand Canyon does not have that option.
The part that sits worst with me is who is best equipped to enter and least able to. An ABC survey this month found DJI is the primary drone for 97.1% of US construction contractors who fly, months after the FCC blocked new foreign models from authorization. The American surveyors with the fleets and the mapping experience to win this are the ones watching their hardware pipeline close. DJI is running a global goodwill campaign in a country legislating its drones out of the market, and the operators caught in the middle are Americans who just want to keep working.
Sources: DJI Enterprise contest page, DJI Enterprise Insights blog, DJI Enterprise (YouTube), National Park Service, PR Newswire
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
