Love Polycam! My wife just got the newest iPhone this fall before our remodel started and I was stoked to capture our house before the remodel and cannot wait to get the after all scanned in for comparison. https://poly.cam/capture/11B48FCD-E6A5-4ED7-9C9D-BF5DFE60579...
I love the app! The interior designer and property agent who saw me using it were pretty blown away.
One thing I struggle with though is making sure that the capture is robust enough before I move on. I usually only really know that something is off when the capture is done already. Can I “touch up” an existing capture by doing another local scan of a problematic area?
Unless you want to move all the furniture out of place (even in-built one), all the heavy stuff blocking edges and corners from view etc. Good luck with that bathroom sink or kitchen counter-top.
And angles and inequalities (eg. top edge vs bottom edge), that gets funny fast.
There are companies today like Matterport: https://matterport.com/ which leverage LiDAR to do high detail measurements and mapping for various applications.
My company uses them to measure prior to use creating build plans for remodels and I used them at my previous company to do high detail measurements in the context of real estate to make 3D tours of homes.
If the iPhone can eventually get to the point where Matterport is today with their tech then that's good enough for a huge number of use cases.
Pretty much everyone in the construction and remodeling industry right now is prepping for that as the future. We all know it's 3 to 5 years away and want to be the first one to get it right.
Everyone is prepping for those self driving cars for the last 10 years, yet we are still swinging those steering wheels ourselves :)
There are certainly cases where LiDAR approach can work wonders. But as long as you need to do a couple of corrections manually, you'll need to have both set of tools at your disposal.
It will definitely augment current measuring approach (or rather, existing tools will be used to augment results coming from 3D scanning), but as soon as you have to pull out a laser or tape for one edge, your workflow is significantly more complex.
Not to mention that for cases where one might use SH3D, it'd be hard to tell an automated tool to ignore that 2"x2" "tooth" in one corner for just wanting to look at different furniture arrangement.
isn't that all of the more reason to use a high-resolution 3d LIDAR point cloud - to get the exactly geometry? I hear your point about moving furniture, but you kind of need to do that anyway to get a measuring tape into corners.
But then you need to measure "free standing" wall (when measuring the opening is not an option), and without someone to hold something flat at the other end for the laser to bounce off, measuring tape still wins.
Which is not to say that laser is not extremely useful: I generally use both.
TBF that would be a good application of AI to infer what is clutter and what is not from the visual light image of the same space, the wall behind an object can simply be inferred from the sections of that wall that aren't occluded by the clutter. It might not catch some obscure cases where clutter obscures some anomalous part of the wall, but it'll be good enough in the other 99% of cases. Multiple viewpoints would probably deal with a large number of oddities too - much how photometry can get more accurate with more viewpoints already.
I found this youtube channel[0] has some pretty good walkthroughs (quite literally) of using various iOS apps to scan architectural spaces. The short answer is that the LIDAR and iOS APIs are remarkably powerful, but not 100% accurate. There are techniques to improve accuracy (e.g. using a gimbal), but ultimately you'll need to do tape or laser measurements and modify the models that these tools can build, or just model it yourself with the scan as a reference.
MagicPlan[1] and PolyCam[2] seem to be the most focused on building a schematic level building model which could be imported into other tools if needed. They both now take advantage of the Roomplan API[3] which Apple introduced in iOS and iPadOS 16[4]. MagicPlan has been out for ages[4] and originally just worked off the camera and the accelerometer to help build a floor plan. Polycam also supports photogrammetry[5] where you just take a bunch of photos and it builds a 3D model by interpreting what shape the object could be (I don't know if this is also used in architecture scale things, but it could be interesting for ID projects). Both MagicPlan and PolyCam allow you to tweak dimensions of rooms, doors, windows, furniture, etc. in a somewhat parametric way. This is where you likely want a laser measuring device to quickly update the dimensions. These can be used through Bluetooth to enter the measurements directly into the floorplans in MagicPlan[6]. I didn't try this, but if I was doing this all the time, it seems like it would be essential.
Matterport is starting to get into mobile[7] (phone, tablet) capture, but they've built their business up on their branded hardware and cloud platform. They provide floorplans as a service[8] and everything adds up, but from what I see in the real estate market, they are ubiquitous.
And if you want to spend a bunch more for very pro level app for documenting things like crime scenes, shipbuilding, infrastructure, etc. there's Dot3D.[9]
I have been playing with RTAB-Map and a Kinect, and exporting to various formats and it works reasonably well, but is still far from user-friendly. They also have a iOS version if you want to play around with it.
Download RTABMap and the OpenNI drivers and export as ply and use CloudCompare and MeshLab to play with the pointclouds. I am not a fan of the mesh function in RTAB-Map and there are some buggy options which insta-crash it on export. Meshlab is also super-buggy and has a terrible GUI. Have fun!
There are several products out there that can create 2d, 3d renderings of a living space using the iphone lidar scanner. Not sure it they keep dimensions.
