Michelangelo’s majestic 17-foot-statue has stood in Florence’s Galleria dell'Accademia since 1873. But a new project involving a team of engineers, technicians and restorers hopes to bring the most faithful, sophisticated replica ever made of David, to Dubai’s rescheduled Expo 2020 later this year. This project, which began several months ago, is being carried out in three distinct stages. First, high-tech scanners are used to make an exact digital version of the statue. Then, the individual parts are 3D-printed and finally, these parts are assembled and refined by a dedicated team of restorers. To ensure the utmost precision of every last detail of the sculpture, researchers from the University of Florence collaborated with Hexagon, a Swedish multinational company. Together they scanned the statue using a tracer combined with a laser. Technicians then used a projector to illuminate the surface and capture all of the details with two high-resolution cameras.