Room plan: survey a room before renovation with iPhone LiDAR

What you get in a few minutes

You walk through the room sweeping walls, floor and ceiling. LiDAR measures the surfaces and ARKit tracks your position. At the end of the survey, the app stores:

• A top-down 2D plan, as an image or a printable PDF, free to export.
• A 3D model of the room, viewable from every angle, in the real colours seen by the camera (Lidark Pro).
• An altitude profile and the survey duration, stored in the survey sheet.

Send the survey to your contractor

The PDF or image plan is sent like any file, by message or email. With Lidark Pro you also export the 3D model as PLY, OBJ or GLB.

The recipient installs nothing: Lidark’s free 3D viewer opens the file in a browser, lets them walk around the room, cut the ceilings and measure between two points. The file stays on their computer and is not sent to any server.

Lidark or a floor-plan app?

Interior-plan apps such as magicplan, or those built on RoomPlan, Apple’s framework, recognise walls, doors and windows and produce a dimensioned plan. If that is what you want, they are a better fit. Our comparison of 3D scanning apps explains the principle.

Lidark does something else: it reproduces the real shape of the room as a mesh, without simplifying it into rectangles. That helps for an awkward room, a vault, a basement or an attic, and scanning and the plan are free. From the same survey you get a plan of the shape and a 3D model to inspect.

Prepare the room

A few habits improve the survey a lot:

• Turn all the lights on: the iPhone’s visual tracking likes lit rooms and walls with a bit of relief.
• Clear what you can, or accept that furniture will show up in the model.
• Avoid scanning toward large windows or mirrors, which LiDAR measures poorly.
• Move slowly and finish by coming back to the starting point.

An indicative survey: what that means

The iPhone’s LiDAR reaches about five metres with a resolution on the order of a centimetre. On a room, that is enough for a first estimate, to check that a piece of furniture fits, to compare options. It is not the accuracy of a site laser or a land survey, and small drifts can build up over long paths.

To order made-to-measure parts, sign a quote down to the last millimetre or document a contractual state, redo the critical dimensions with a tape or laser, or ask for a professional survey. Lidark saves you the first step, not the last.

Cellar, attic, garage: the same moves

Outbuilding spaces are surveyed the same way, often to more benefit since they are rarely documented. See scan a basement, attic or crawl space. To reuse the room in modelling software, see scan a room to a 3D model: GLB, OBJ, PLY.

Frequently asked questions