iOS 16 comes with an amazing new API called RoomPlan. It creates a 3D plan by simply scanning a room with the iPhone’s LiDAR. And the result is very successful.
Apple recently unveiled its new iOS 16 operating system, which will be available this fall. And this one never ceases to surprise, since it has been announced that it will soon be possible to create a 3D plan of an interior using your iPhone. However, if some applications can already do this, they are not always the most accurate. This is now made possible by the new application programming interface (API) called RoomPlan, which uses the iPhone and iPad’s LiDAR – a pulsed laser beam that makes it possible to measure distances and thus analyze objects and their dimensions of objects a part – to quickly create a 3D plan. A feature that will delight real estate agents and interior designers.
A complete plan in seconds
Filipe Esposito, a journalist for 9to5Mac, reveals that he was able to test this technology thanks to demonstration code that the developers lent him. He explains that he was able to create a 3D plan of his living room in a few seconds simply by pointing his iPhone’s camera at the walls of the room using a compatible application.
The API can even recognize specific objects, which it renders as blocks so that the focus is on the floor plan. “What impressed me the most, apart from the precision, was the speed of the scan,” explains the journalist. The API provides excellent animations and a real-time preview showing the progress of the scan.” The 3D floor plan can be exported as a USDZ file compatible with popular tools such as Cinema 4D, Shapr3D and AutoCAD.