Construction & AEC

Laan Labs builds 3D capture software for contractors, architects, engineers and facility owners. A walk through a building with a phone produces an as-built scan, an editable floor plan, dimensions that can be taken later, and a photorealistic walkthrough to share, without a laser scanner or a survey crew. Laan Labs created one of the first LiDAR scanning apps for iPhone and has built space measurement systems for industrial clients. For listings, floor plans and virtual staging, see real estate.

Projects run on knowing what is actually there. Drawings are out of date, a site visit answers the one question that was asked and not the next one, and a terrestrial laser scan is accurate but too slow and expensive to repeat every week. Phone-based capture fills the gap between a photograph and a survey: fast enough to do routinely, complete enough to measure from afterwards, and good enough for layout, quantities, coordination and records.

The same capture serves the whole life of a building: existing conditions before design, progress during construction, a handover record at completion, and a digital twin of the facility for the people who operate it.

How Laan Labs helps

As-built capture and scan-to-CAD

LiDAR and photo scans converted into structured geometry: walls, openings and rooms as editable floor plans and DXF, and equipment as solid models, so designers start from current conditions.

Floor plans in minutes

Automatic plans from iPhone and iPad scans with dimensions and areas, exported as PNG, PDF, SVG or DXF, as in Laan Labs' open-source OpenPlan3D.

Progress and condition documentation

Repeat captures of the same spaces aligned to each other, giving a dated visual record of what was built, when, and in what state, for coordination, payment and disputes.

Facility digital twins

A navigable 3D record of a plant, warehouse or building that combines scans, Gaussian splats and photographs, in which teams locate equipment, plan changes and take measurements without a site visit.

Photorealistic walkthroughs

Gaussian splat captures of interiors and exteriors that reproduce how the place looks from the areas that were photographed, for briefing a remote team, reviewing a site with a client or recording a handover.

AR visualization

Proposed designs shown in place at full scale on a phone, tablet or headset, such as planning a kitchen in the customer's own room.

Measurement and space management

Dimensions, areas, volumes and clearances taken from the capture rather than on site, for layout, storage planning and logistics.

Where to start

A sensible first step is one building and one use, such as existing-conditions capture for a renovation or a record of a facility's plant rooms. Laan Labs sets up the capture and delivery workflow, compares the results with known dimensions, and agrees with the client where phone capture is sufficient and where survey-grade scanning is still needed.

The workflow can then be delivered as a branded app, licensed as components for an existing product, or extended with georeferencing and inspection features. See 3D capture and technology licensing and 3D capture pipelines.

Laan Labs products in this field

• OpenPlan3D — Open-source floor plan editor with iPhone LiDAR scanning
• 3D Splat App — Photorealistic Gaussian splat captures on Mac
• OpenShape3D — Open-source solid-modeling CAD for iPad

Common questions