In the last 4 years, a high-resolution 3D motion capture system named 3DVision was installed at ENEA Casaccia as integration to more conventional instrumentation for measuring motion parameters during seismic tests, such as accelerometers, LVDTs, wire transducers and laser displacement sensors. In the present paper, some examples are illustrated to show the ENEA experiences with this relatively new technique in comparison to the other consolidated measurement systems. 3DVision is described in terms of flexibility and accuracy and specific potentialities are stressed. The main peculiarities of the 3DVision system derive from its capability of monitoring in real-time the absolute 3D position of more than a hundred measurement points without locating any active sensor or cable on the studied structure and on the shaking table, but only by means of cheap passive markers. Consequently, any risk of instrumentation damage in case of destructive tests is intrinsically avoided and the acquisition of hundreds of channels is guaranteed. Within the DySCo virtual lab, the 3DVision friendly graphical interface for real-time monitoring and its synchronous overlay function between markers wireframe and tests movies revealed particularly effective for remote sharing of the experimental campaigns with research partners via the internet. Also a remarkable contribution is given by the possibility of integrating and comparing experimental data with FE results at the same positions, calibrating FEM boundary conditions (materials properties, model constraints, loads etc.) in order to improve the simulation significance and reliability for similar cases. Through the DySCO web portal such numerical simulations and computations can be carried out exploiting the software and hardware resources available in the ENEA-GRID. © 2013 WIT Press.