[Updated: 2020-12-22 added additional applications]

Okay this is a bit of a niche post for those interested in 3D scanning of buildings (modern and historic, inside and out), as well as sites (a walking route or garden) without forking out a lot* of money.Β  Following on from my previous post I have tested the iPhone 12 Pro more with a variety of applications and buildings.

Captured on a sunny day in 5 minutes or so, are there mistakes and errors? Yes. Can I live with them? Yes. Did I need to be taller? Yes!

Please note: If you want a real professional survey with cm/mm accuracy backed by survey-grade equipment, then this article is not for you.  None of these applications currently positions the resulting models geographically (although you can place it manually). My only observation here for those who look down on this particular piece of LiDAR technology and by this particular smart phone manufacturer (Apple) is this: I feel this is the first generation of β€˜scanning’ hardware that is actually useable and it will not be the last. Many people will end up owning this device and this technology so we cannot ignore it.

Personally, I have found scanning gardens, smaller houses, and historic buildings to be more accurate than I expected.  It is not perfect but if you know the limitations and error margins this might make some of your work quicker, cheaper, and better.  My starting point is this: if you got three trained competent professionals to measure a property inside and out you will probably get three different measurements within a range or error margin. These error margins would also be larger when measuring old buildings, sometimes our work comes down to interpretation.

Internal and External Scan of a Historic Barn. Measurable (maybe not that precise!) in SketchUp

The scenario on which I base this review

Consider a common scenario for an Architect, planner, or related professional. Turn up at site alone with a phone, perhaps a real camera, and a tape measure.  The site plans you make will form the basis of a planning application. You do not have time to repeatedly visit a site repeatedly, so you need to get all the measurements you need first time.  We use photography to capture as much of a site or building as possible.  We try and get all the measurements we need, but be honest here, anyone who has done this on a regular basis knows measurements can be missed, levels can go unrecorded.  Now, often we are using our mobile phones to take the photos and perhaps an app to backup those photos for use back in the office.  If the phone in your pocket now has the ability to quickly create a reasonably accurate 3D model of a place which allows you to get β€˜good enough’ measurements for places you might well have missed why wouldn’t you use it?

A walk around the block and then carefully georeferenced and displayed in ArcGIS Pro, I’ve checked various measurements and they’re ‘good enough’

I have now tried the iPhone12 Pro on enough buildings in enough conditions (sunny and rainy) to be confident enough to recommend using the applications below to produce 3D measurable scans for getting dimensions and using as part of visualisations across a range of potential jobs.  There is some caveats: you might not reach the roof without a ladder or a pole!  Also do your own testing, make sure the outputs work for you, workflows and software choices are important.  A reminder that this in my mind is the first of useable 3D capture technologies on a portable and relatively* cheap device.  For me seeing it work on sunny day on a range of surfaces felt like a gamechanger.

The Recommended LiDAR 3D Scanning Applications

Historic Bridge (tricky with vegetation) in SketchUp

I currently recommend four applications for you to explore in more depth, each app has a different use case I feel that could fill a niche in someone’s work.  I will do another post where I can outline a few workflows that work for me, as well as software that might help. All the apps as far as I can tell work in the same using the same Apple AR SDK (so that means they all have similar limitations), but each take a different approach to exports. It should be noted none of this place the result scans in a geographic position, they are all locally related coordinates that need positioning.  I have thoughts on that in the next post (when I get around to writing it) but it is not a deal breaker at this time.

  1. 3D Scanner Apphttp://www.3dscannerapp.com/
    I cannot tell you how good this is, and it is currently free! If nothing else download this. It captures from what I can tell no end of data (I walked 0.2 miles to my local school with it running).Β  I have captured my house inside and out (I will not post imagery of my messy house here sorry. It can export in all the formats you would want and importantly it also can give you all the photos it took so you can use them in other photogrammetry software if you need to.Β  It has a good and easy to use interface. I love that I can export quickly to DAE and use directly in SketchUp.Β  Much of my imagery comes from this app.
  2. Polycam https://polycam.ai
    This application like 3D Scanner App is bloody fantastic, clean easy to use interface, with an amazing array of export options. I also think this has better features for scanning rooms as it has some nice simplification and voxel size options. However if you want to export to anything useful (other than USDZ for iMessages) then you need to pay for a yearly subscription of Β£19.49 per year, Β£3.99 per month, or Β£54.99 as a one-time purchase. If you’re just experimenting I’d recommend staying with 3D Scanner App…
  3. pronoPointsScan https://prono82.com/pronopointsscan/
    As the name suggests it scans points, its free for limited use but pay the one time Β£6.99 and you have no limits.Β  It basically scans and outputs the resulting data as plain text files which record the position of the point and the RGB value.Β  Free products like CloudCompare can read this stuff.Β  It has a terrible interface, not attractive and not intuitive like 3D Scanner App, but hey I guess it will get better and it’s not impossible to use!
  4. EveryPointhttps://everypoint.io/
    Interesting scanning app that seems to focus on point cloud production. A big downside seems to be not being able to view a scan after completing it. It saves as ply file (point cloud) and when you are scanning it shows you a depthmap as well which I like. It is free currently so worth having a look at.
  5. SiteScape https://www.sitescape.ai/
    Another point cloud scanner application that feels really fast when scanning. Not much in terms of interface though and little in the way of export options (just ply files). I like it but needs some more work, however check out their website as they are talking about analysis of scans so I think this app is the first of a larger picture for SiteScape.
  6. Canvashttps://canvas.io/
    This is the grandfather of 3D scanning applications, Occipital were one of the first (if not the first) to produce 3D scanning hardware for iDevices like the structure sensor 1 & 2.Β  I have a structure sensor and it could never handle outdoors well. Now with the new iPhone their software is what makes them brilliant.Β  Not only can you scan buildings (it’s built for internal plans) you can also process it in the cloud for better models and they have a service where they turn your scans into SketchUp ready models.Β  The application and scans are free but pricing depends on what you want as an output.
  7. RoomScan LiDARhttps://www.locometric.com/lidar
    This is quite different from the applications I’ve discussed above, for one thing it is a subscription model (Β£9.99 a month).Β  But it really does take a fantastically different approach.Β  It’s main aim is to produce floor plans so instead of wobbly meshes that you have to cut or interpret to make straight lines for architectural plans this app does it for you.Β  The interface walks you through the process and really you walk around a room labelling each wall, then you label doors, and windows. With labelling doors it asks you what room it leads to and quickly you build a really nice floorplan. Plus the scan you make is used as part of the floor plans (they call flyplan) to add an artistic take to you outputs.Β  I can see many people using this.Β Β  A word of warning this is probably not good for historic buildings with wobbly walls!

Final Thoughts

Bridge Road Surface tricky to scan with cars around but easily possible (gaps because I was actually on a family walk at the time…) in SketchUp

So, what do I recommend? Well they are all built on the same software and hardware kit essentially. I would go with the first one, try it out see what works for you, then start exploring other applications.  Definitely RoomScan LiDAR and Canvas are very good for professionals wanting clean outputs but they are at a cost.  For cool experiments pronoPointsScan is well worth a purchase but you need more technical knowhow for this data.

A scanned model of my house using the 3D Scanner App. I’ve checked and measuring from here is relatively accurate. As a mesh and a family house I’m aware it looks untidy!

My intention is to write a follow to the post detailing the various software applications you can use with the outputs from a couple of these applications. 

*When I say a lot (or relatively cheap) I mean in the 10s of thousands of pounds not the Β£1000 price of this particular hardware device.  Architects and planners frequently pay thousands already to get scans or surveys of their sites.

32 Comments

  1. Thank you! I searched such a review many days. Can you write what is the accuracy of RoomScan in comparison with a simple tape? For example, if we take 5m wall, what is the difference: 1cm, 5cm, or larger?
    Thanks!

    • You’re welcome in terms of accuracy I can only say “it depends” but I’ve seen it within 1 to 5cm… the thing with RoomScan is that naturally it is making straight lines off of wobbly data. My only suggestion right now is to try it in your own house first and see how it can work for you. Here in the UK planning application drawings are ‘accurate’ but obviously line thickness on paper at certain scales can be interpreted! I’ve got a 5 part series of posts coming that should give you some ideas for workflows and software.

  2. Thank you very much! That exactly what I wanted to know. Problem is that I don’t have a iPad or iPhone 2020. I wanted to buy it for my work, but I needed to know what is the accuracy. For my purposes 1cm is the limit, maybe 2, but 5 – is too much.

    • You’re welcome, I think the only way to truly know is to use it yourself, I suspect for work justifying purchases based on limited testing by me and my blogs won’t work πŸ˜‰ Again accuracy requirements are what will sway you here, if you want sub-1cm then this will never do, maybe in two phone generations time though!

  3. Hi Elliot,
    Great reviews, thank you.
    Have you got a recommendation for software suitable for providing gOOD 3D images and measurements for large roof ares?

    • Thanks for comment, in regards to recommendations it depends what device you’re using to capture the data. Plenty of photogrammetry software programs out there. Some expect drone imagery others you can use ordinary cameras, there are even some opensource programs as well. If you’re asking about measuring the 3D models created from the iPhone12 Pro apps then I don’t have too much issue with the built in measure tools. However SketchUp on a desktop is good too… again it depends what you’re wanting to do with it!

  4. Hello, Elliot! Thank you for the article! In how many years will a real professional survey with cm/mm accuracy be possible using just a smartphone? What do you think?

  5. Hi there, I love this article! I don’t have an iPhone but I read a similar article about this which got me intrigued and I got a friend to scan a chair (exciting I know) using the 3d scanner app.

    The question I have is how did you get it into ArcGIS Pro? My friend showed me the export options but none seemed to be in a format which ArcGIS Pro would accept. The ones he mentioned were Point cloud exports, 3d printing formats etc. Perhaps you used a different application to export into ArcGIS Pro friendly format?

    • You can bring into ArcGIS Pro directly (this would need the 3D Analyst extension), or like me (mostly) use a tool like CityEngine that can then export as FGDB.. I hope to write more on this soon, sorry for a long delay doing the other parts of this blog!

  6. Hi Elliot,
    Thanks for your article. Great Job!
    For a specific project, we need to modelise in 3D a 1 Km long street. The model doesn’t need to be very accurate and we keep our 3D in grayscale with a rough modelisation. I thought that this lidar scan could give us a perfect scaling ref. From your article, 3D Scanner App looks to be the best option. Even if we have a budget. How will you proceed to scan an entire street? doing it at once? is there a time or size limitation of the scan? I’m asking this because I don’t have that Iphone and the shoot is happening in an other country,… If you’ve any advice to scan an entire street please shoot!!

    • Hi! Well I wouldn’t attempt a whole street in one go for that distance. I would divide it up and there will be some effort joining scans together later. Do a test run first, the process is so quick you can try a few techniques to make it work. I have done some partial streets and associated building frontages. It really depends how much of the street you want. Feel free to reach out for additional discussion if required.

  7. Hi Elliot, I have just stumbled across your article, I have recently purchased an ipad pro for work (I’m an architect who mostly works on extensions). Great article!! I’ve been looking around for fellow professionals to see what their opinion is, I’ll report back how I get on.
    Keep up the good work!

  8. Thanks, this is a super helpful article. I’m a designer deciding between buying an iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. Your review pushed me over the edge. Along with the photo capability, I think the Pro is worth the extra $ for the scanning, even if it’s first-gen. Thanks again.

  9. Hi Elliot, I would also suggest LidarCad under Β£20 to buy and has the best features for survey. Output into cad format , layer and has plane detection. I use this for external survey to produce cross-sections in civil3D. I would suggest complete the house survey as one item and the land survey as a separate with minimal vertical movements of the iPad for best accuracy.. reasonable results, where traditional survey is not cost effective(small extension).

    The work flow is quite simple as Lidarcad also produces a point cloud (also layered in autocad).

    Please update your article as you progress.
    Thanks

      • Hi Elliot, i have asked LidarCad to reduce layer resolution on certain layers.. i noticed that when their scan did not detect a plane ,ie. an uneven land survey it was added to a later β€œnone” that had a very high resolution of scan points.. i asked them to allow a one point every 500mm to give a usable profile of the existing ground as part of a survey for proposed highway, also the removal of point on wall planes but produce boundaries on the corners.
        These changes will allow a simple survey to be produced and translated into a surface in civil3d, reduced processing times.
        I hope the changes will be in the next update.. it will make the workflow quicker , the main problem with the iPad lidar is too much information.at least for my civils element of the work.

        I will let you know when the update comes and send a sample if you are interested.

  10. It’s a great breakdown of the apps and you shared very useful insights about how it could be used in practice by architects. I’ve started a company recently that focuses on remote hardware installations using this approach: vizonare.com, but this use cases you describe make a lot of sense too. Thank you for sharing Elliot! πŸ‘

  11. Hi Elliot,
    Thank you for the really helpful article. Can I ask, once i have scanned garden in polycam (for example) how do i find the change in levels? I can see the model and the floorplan but i want to find the rise/fall across the space. Any ideas would be really appreciate.
    Many thanks

    • Hi and you’re welcome. To find a change in levels you need to find an app that gives you the right tools. In my line of work I would use ArcGIS. I think you could try SketchUp or look in the appstore for your device… sorry I haven’t kept up with all the features since I wrote this πŸ™‚

  12. Hi Elliot,
    Thanks for a very informative article, much appreciated. I’m a project manager (mainly residential clients, alterations/extensions etc) and regularly use SketchUp to do basic 3-D models to help clients visualise spaces, layouts and so on. I likely will purchase a newer iPad Pro to take scans on initial visits, the accuracy range is fine, but a little scared of what I do with everything once it’s all on my iPad. Is it relatively easy to sort to be able to share with others via email?
    Many thanks,
    John

    • Hi John thanks for the kind words. Things have moved on a little since that article! My suggestion is to look at those apps that have hosting of models as part of their offering now, most do free trials. There is also the option of SketchUp Studio which comes with a point cloud plugin which is interesting as well πŸ™‚ The real trick is deciding what you want to do with the model, visualization or measurement or something else.

  13. I’ve been playing about with Polycam, amazing app, but on a practical level am looking more at using Magicplan (who also host), which I think supplies all I need and it’s not unnecessarily over-complicated. Many thanks,

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