AR-powered property scanning & mapping

The problem

Indoor and outdoor scanning rely on different technologies that don't naturally work together. The result: fragmented data and no unified plan of the full property.

1. Disconnected spaces – indoor rooms and outdoor plots scanned with different tools, no way to align or merge them
2. No unified output – separately scanned spaces couldn't be combined into one 2D floor plan or a complete 3D model
3. Disconnected data – rooms, sketches, photos, and measurements lived in separate tools with no unified project view

The starting point

Before

• RoomPlan and LiDAR working in isolation, on separate apps
• No shared coordinate frame between indoor and outdoor scans
• Sketches, photos, and measurements scattered across tools
• No path from a raw scan to a deliverable property report

The challenge

One app that captures the entire property – indoor and outdoor – into a single, deliverable plan.

The solution

One app. Full property – inside and out.

Indoor

• Guided room scanning with Apple RoomPlan
• Smart manual-connect fallback for incomplete scans
• Sketch portal: edit and annotate floor plans post-scan
• Multi-floor support
• PDF export with images and measurements

Outdoor

• LiDAR scanning of surrounding plot and exterior terrain
• Photo capture tied to the scan flow
• Orthophoto projection and bird's-eye view of the site
• Textured 3D mesh of the full outdoor area
• PDF export: floor plans, photos, and measurements

Key decisions

1. Guided RoomPlan with manual-connect fallback

RoomPlan handles most rooms cleanly, but real properties have edge cases – narrow corridors, partial occlusions, mirrored surfaces. Instead of failing the scan, we fall back to a manual-connect step that lets the operator stitch incomplete rooms by hand. No lost work mid-walkthrough.

2. LiDAR + video fusion for textured 3D outdoors

We record video alongside the LiDAR scan, select the cleanest frames for texture, fuse them with the LiDAR point cloud into a mesh, and texture it. The output is a detailed 3D model of the full outdoor area – usable as a deliverable, not just a debug view.

3. Orthophoto from scan data

Outdoor scans are reprojected into a top-down orthographic photo of the site. That gives a familiar, plan-view artefact for reports and downstream GIS workflows – without sending the operator back out for a drone pass.

4. Sketch portal for post-scan corrections

Floor plans rarely come out perfect on the first pass. The sketch portal lets operators confirm, adjust, or draw room geometry and measurements after the scan – turning a rough capture into a clean, exportable plan.

5. Unified PDF export

Indoor floor plan, outdoor site map, photos, and measurements ship in one report. The deliverable is the report, not a folder of raw data.

Results

• 9 months from kickoff to App Store submission
• 10× faster than manual property documentation
• Ready-to-use floor and site plans straight out of the app
• One workflow covering indoor rooms, outdoor plots, and the connection between them
• Unified PDF deliverable replacing fragmented per-tool exports