Laser Scanning With Your iPhone
For Free! 🤑🤑
Hi friends,
Today, I want to share with you how you can laser scan 3D objects with your iPhone. 📱📱 The best - it’s for free.
The app which lets you do it is called Scaniverse and as I recently learned your iPhone doesn’t need a LiDAR scanner any more. It works for all iPhones, starting with the iPhone XS. You can check out the announcement here.
Let’s start off with an example. I used the app extensively in my master thesis. I scanned existing steel beams and measured their horizontal and vertical deflection in Revit to check if these fulfill the requirements.
Sure, the accuracy is not as good as with a professional and expensive scanning device. But it
only took 1 minute to scan
didn’t cost anything
easy to understand (it’s like taking a video with your phone)
I am really positive on this technology and how it can help many of us on site.
You can check out my extensive article to learn how to use Scaniverse.
In one of my projects at work, I had to verify that the trapezoidal roof sheeting can resist the additional load of solar panels (0.16 kN/m2). There was unfortunately no documentation about the geometry or load bearing capacity of the sheeting. So I drove to site with a colleague, and we measured the geometry from underneath with a meter stick. As you can imagine, you can’t really measure the width of the bottom surface of the top flange. But because I knew about Scaniverse we could also extract that dimension accurately enough.
Other examples where this technology can be used a lot in our industry. I am thinking about:
Real estate agents scanning apartments. That way, tenants get a better feeling of the place
Communication between a person on site and a project leader. The person on site can quickly make a scan and send it further to a person in the office if communication by words is too complicated or documentation is required.
Documentation purposes in general. Measurements with meter stick are hard to document
This was just a few examples.
Now I am really curious to know from you if that is something that you will try out. And in what areas do you think scanning with a phone could be used?
Let us know in the comments or respond to this email. ✍️✍️
Have a great day!
Laurin