Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers about Laan Labs: who we are, what we build, how technology licensing works, and the 3D capture and spatial computing technology behind our products. If your question is not here, email labs@laan.com.

Last updated October 4, 2026

About Laan Labs

What is Laan Labs?

Laan Labs is a software development studio that specializes in computer vision, spatial computing and AI. Founded by brothers Christopher and Jason Laan, the company has been building next-generation technology for almost 20 years, both for clients and as its own products. Laan Labs apps have been downloaded more than 70 million times, and the company has worked with brands including Nike, HBO, Toyota and MLS.

Who founded Laan Labs?

Laan Labs was founded by brothers Christopher Laan and Jason Laan. Christopher is based in New Orleans and Jason in New York. Both come from engineering backgrounds in electrical and chemical engineering and apply that rigorous, scientific approach to software. Together they have led the teams behind well-known products such as Face Swap Live, iVideoCamera, 3D Scanner App and early work on Venmo. Projects at Laan Labs are founder-led, so clients work directly with them rather than through layers of account management.

Where is Laan Labs located?

Laan Labs is based in New York and New Orleans, Louisiana, and works remotely with clients across the United States and internationally.

What is Laan Labs best known for?

Laan Labs is best known for groundbreaking mobile app development. Over the years the company has had a large number of number one apps in the App Store, and its apps have been downloaded more than 70 million times. Landmark apps include iVideoCamera, which brought video recording to early iPhone models that shipped without it; Face Swap Live, the original real-time face swapping app, released in 2015; and 3D Scanner App, one of the first and most popular apps to use the LiDAR sensor on iPhone and iPad. More recently the company has focused on Gaussian splatting, mobile 3D capture and spatial computing, with products such as 3D Splat App for Mac, RadianceView for inspection and documentation, and AirDraw for Apple Vision Pro.

Which companies has Laan Labs worked with?

Laan Labs has worked with both large brands and small companies, including Nike, HBO, NBC, MTV, TBS, Toyota, Volkswagen, Prada, Vimeo, Twitter, Grubhub, Venmo and MLS, as well as startups, insurers and industrial clients that license its 3D capture technology.

Which industries does Laan Labs work in?

Laan Labs technology has been used in insurance, medical, construction, manufacturing, retail, aerospace, automotive, real estate, media and entertainment. Typical projects include 3D capture and measurement of spaces and objects, inspection and documentation of physical assets, computer vision for photography and e-commerce, and AI features inside consumer mobile apps. See the industries page for insurance, real estate, medical and body scanning, robotics, utilities, aerospace and construction in detail.

Services and how we work

What services does Laan Labs offer?

Laan Labs offers four main services: AI solution development, from consulting and proof-of-concepts through production-ready systems; computer vision and spatial computing, including custom CV pipelines, 3D capture and XR applications; rapid prototyping that validates an idea with a working prototype in weeks; and technology integration that connects AI, machine learning and computer vision to a client's existing products and systems. Each is described on the services page.

What kinds of computer vision problems does Laan Labs solve?

Laan Labs builds custom computer vision systems for object detection and tracking, pose estimation, segmentation, measurement, 3D reconstruction and scene understanding, with a particular focus on running models on-device on phones, tablets and headsets rather than only in the cloud. Examples include real-time 3D car pose estimation for automotive photography, person segmentation for masking 3D scans, and extracting floor plans and semantic geometry from room scans.

Does Laan Labs work with large language models and generative AI?

Yes. Laan Labs integrates and fine-tunes large language models and combines them with computer vision, for example in CreatorView, a system that watches social media video and uses computer vision plus LLMs to assess creator and brand fit. Laan Labs also builds AI agents and LLM-powered features into existing products.

Can Laan Labs train models with synthetic data?

Yes. Laan Labs generates synthetic training data when real annotated data is expensive or unavailable, rendering varied scenes with 3D assets and automatic labels. It has used this approach to train car pose estimation and foot pose estimation models at a fraction of the cost of manual annotation. See the car dataset and foot dataset case studies.

How long does a project with Laan Labs take?

A typical Laan Labs engagement starts with a short scoping conversation, followed by a working prototype or proof-of-concept in a matter of weeks. Production systems follow from there in weeks or months rather than years, depending on scope. Laan Labs is a small, senior team, so there is little overhead between a decision and working software.

Who will actually work on my project?

Projects at Laan Labs are founder-led. Christopher and Jason Laan are directly involved in the engineering, supported by a small team of experienced engineers. Clients have direct access to the people building their software, with no layers of project management in between.

Does Laan Labs work with startups as well as large companies?

Yes. Laan Labs works with both. Large clients have included Nike, HBO, Toyota and Volkswagen; startup clients have licensed source code to accelerate their own computer vision and machine learning teams, or engaged Laan Labs to build a first prototype and validate an idea.

Which platforms and technologies does Laan Labs build for?

Laan Labs builds native apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS, as well as Android, web and cloud back ends. Its specialties include Apple frameworks such as ARKit, RoomPlan, Metal and Core ML, GPU programming in Metal and CUDA, 3D reconstruction tools such as COLMAP and Gaussian splatting, and machine learning in PyTorch. The company has full-stack capability from mobile apps to cloud infrastructure.

Technology licensing

Can I license Laan Labs technology for my own product?

Yes. Laan Labs licenses its apps and technologies as white-label and source code solutions. Its 3D capture pipelines for LiDAR, TrueDepth, RoomPlan and photo-based reconstruction are available both as frameworks that your team integrates and as source code that your team can build on, which greatly reduces product development cost and time to market.

3D capture and spatial computing

What is Gaussian splatting?

Gaussian splatting is a technique for turning ordinary photos or video of a real scene into a photorealistic 3D scene that renders in real time. Instead of a polygon mesh, the scene is represented as millions of small, soft, overlapping 3D blobs (Gaussians), each with a position, shape, color and opacity, which are optimized until renders match the original photographs. Radiance fields are a Laan Labs specialty: it builds Gaussian splatting tools such as 3D Splat App, uses splats in RadianceView, and offers Gaussian splatting services. There is a plain-language primer at What Is Gaussian Splatting?

What is the difference between photogrammetry, NeRFs and Gaussian splatting?

All three reconstruct 3D from photographs. Photogrammetry produces a textured polygon mesh, which is editable and measurable but struggles with reflective, thin or finely detailed surfaces. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) render very realistic novel views, but early versions were slow to train and even the fast variants are demanding to display. Gaussian splatting matches NeRF image quality while rendering in real time, which makes it practical for interactive viewers, inspection and web delivery. Laan Labs compared these approaches on real assets in its InfraTech 3D scanning case study.

What is mobile LiDAR scanning and how accurate is it?

Mobile LiDAR scanning uses the LiDAR sensor built into iPhone Pro and iPad Pro models to capture rooms, buildings and large objects as 3D meshes and point clouds in minutes, with no extra hardware. It is well suited to room-scale measurement, documentation, floor plans and visualization, with accuracy typically in the centimeter range under good conditions; it is not a replacement for survey-grade instruments where millimeter precision is required. Laan Labs pioneered this workflow with 3D Scanner App and continues it in OpenSurvey3D and RadianceView. See how mobile LiDAR is redefining professional 3D workflows.

What is TrueDepth scanning?

TrueDepth scanning uses the infrared depth sensor on the front of the iPhone, the same sensor used for Face ID, to capture small objects and body parts in fine detail at close range. Because it works entirely on the device, it suits applications where photos cannot be sent to a cloud reconstruction service, such as medical and custom-fit products. Laan Labs has licensed TrueDepth scanning pipelines to organizations that need precise small-scale scans; see the TrueDepth scanning case study.

What is Apple RoomPlan and how does Laan Labs use it?

RoomPlan is an Apple framework that uses the iPhone and iPad LiDAR sensor to produce a parametric model of a room: walls, doors, windows and furniture as labeled geometry rather than a raw mesh. Laan Labs builds on RoomPlan for floor plan extraction and semantic scene understanding, and its open-source OpenPlan3D floor plan editor imports RoomPlan scans directly. See the blog post on semantic geometry with RoomPlan.

What is RadianceView?

RadianceView is an inspection-grade visualization platform built by Laan Labs. It brings mobile 3D scans, traditional LiDAR, Gaussian splats and high-resolution photography together into a single visual record that opens in a web browser, so teams can inspect, measure and report on an asset without being on site, with every finding tied to the place it was observed. It has been used to document end-of-life airliners for parts reuse; see the aircraft documentation case study.

Apps and products

Which apps has Laan Labs made?

Laan Labs has published apps with more than 70 million combined downloads, including 3D Scanner App, Face Swap Live, AirDraw for Apple Vision Pro, 3D Splat App for Mac, Air Measure, Tap DJ, Tap Roulette, and earlier apps such as Sonar Ruler, iVideoCamera and iTimelapse. Current free and open-source projects include OpenPlan3D, OpenShape3D, OpenWater, OpenSurvey3D and SpaceDust. See the full list on the apps page.

What is 3D Splat App?

3D Splat App is a free Mac app from Laan Labs that trains Gaussian splats locally on Apple Silicon. It imports photos, COLMAP datasets or Nerfstudio projects, recovers camera poses with a built-in COLMAP, trains on the Mac GPU using Metal with no cloud upload, and exports PLY, compressed PLY, SPZ and SOG. It also works as a splat viewer and editor, with crop, paint-select and transform tools, and opens splats trained elsewhere. It requires an M1 or later and macOS 15.6 or later.

Does Laan Labs still own 3D Scanner App?

No. Laan Labs created 3D Scanner App, one of the first LiDAR scanning apps on iOS, and sold it in July 2025 to a private investor. Air Measure was sold in 2024. Laan Labs continues to build 3D capture technology, including RadianceView, OpenSurvey3D and 3D Splat App, and licenses its 3D capture pipelines to other companies.

What is AirDraw?

AirDraw is a Laan Labs app for Apple Vision Pro that lets you paint in 3D using your fingers, with your room as the canvas. It includes Sculpt, Physics and Voxel drawing modes and can export creations as USDZ files.

Working with Laan Labs

Will Laan Labs sign an NDA?

Yes. Laan Labs regularly signs non-disclosure agreements before discussing confidential projects, and much of its client work is under NDA.

Still have a question?

Email labs@laan.com or use the contact form and one of the founders will get back to you.