
RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room - tudborg
http://architizer.com/blog/roomscan-app/
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onedognight
Here's an alternative with a more interactive work flow: [http://magic-
plan.com/](http://magic-plan.com/) .

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radley
Tried it. More bells but difficult to make accurate. Hard to use if you can't
see the floor corners of a room or if dealing with short narrow spaces.

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deveac
As did I, quite some time ago. I found it did a poor job with rooms that had
actual _stuff_ in them, -particularly the corners. Seemed cool but I discarded
it as an option even without an alternative. RoomScan has been making its way
around the blogs and I tried it out the other day. It did a great job of
capturing my non-rectangular kitchen (after I failed at my first attempt by
ignoring the instructions to touch each wall, then the 1st and 2nd wall once
more, then ending). Roomscan > for spaces with stuff and/or narrow spaces, or
Magic-Plan > for empty spaces more wide open was basically my experience.

Easy enough to try both though.

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roel_v
Quite disappointed - was hoping this was done through computer vision. Aren't
there are apps that do this? By the time I've 'scanned' a room the way it's
shown in the article, and if that method doesn't even give me heights, doors,
windows and outlets, _and_ is only accurate to within half a foot - by that
time I've measured it with my laser tape measure 3 times over.

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uptown
And your laser tape translates those measurements into a floorplan that's
digitally sharable?

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runjake
My HOWTO:

1\. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper.

2\. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale.

3\. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on
your rough scale paper drawing.

4\. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever).

5\. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard
formats.

6\. There is no step 6.

Some variation of this HOWTO has worked for me professionally for 2 decades.
Sometimes, the _old way_ is better than a novel, high tech solution.

Edit: And yes, I did try the Roomscan app. It was tedious and inaccurate.

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uptown
I bet someone once said the same thing about the laser tape replacing
traditional tape measures.

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roel_v
No, absolutely nobody ever said that. The only con of a laser measure is the
price (compared to a foldable analog one), but apart from that (and for the
purpose of measuring rooms and buildings), a laser measure is superior in
every way.

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willyt
You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some
measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a
tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in
what you have measured. Obviously laser theodolites can solve these problems
but are about 1000 times more expensive than a reel tape.

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th0ma5
This seems to be in the neighborhood of Johnny Lee's thinking in Project
Tango:
[https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/](https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/)
... a lot of the information collected by the increasingly precise sensors is
going to allow for next level of... something... I think Project Tango is an
example of not knowing what the future is in sensing and looking for network
effects to fill in the gap.

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Ashan
Tried this app out a few days ago. The measurements in it are surprisingly
good. I was finding it about ~10% out at most.

All in all, it is a very good (FREE!) app that can be used to get a decent
idea of what might be needed in home renovation.

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umeshunni
I had the opposite experience. It seemed really finicky about how smoothlyI
had to move my tablet from one wall to the next .

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rickyc091
Yeah, I couldn't really get it to work either. The preview seemed to be more
or less accurate, but it wasn't able to generate the layout. I was trying to
double tap to modify the dimensions manually, but it looks like the free
version doesn't allow for it. I guess it's a hit or miss.

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dsirijus
I hoped that either they got their hands on Project Tango device or worked
with this team in Zurich - [http://www.i-programmer.info/news/192-photography-
a-imaging/...](http://www.i-programmer.info/news/192-photography-a-
imaging/6688-any-mobile-camera-can-be-a-3d-scanner.html)

Edit:

Btw, anyone who applied for Project Tango got back from them in any way? I
didn't.

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encoderer
We heard back and got a device last week.

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dsirijus
If so, they're being rude toward the rest of us.

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encoderer
They certainly had a ton of responses, and possibly they plan on working their
way down a list or something.

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LukaszB
Could anyone possibly shed some light on what is used for measurement? gyro?

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dclowd9901
I was actually beginning work on a similar project. Essentially, it's using a
combination of the accelerometer and the gyro to get the phone's position in
3D space. That is, when the accelerometer capture lateral velocity, it knows
it's moving in a certain direction at a certain speed (until, of course, it
receives an opposite velocity, at which point it stops).

~~~
untog
Did you ever manage to get it to be accurate, though? I tried something
similar but the accelerometer and gyro were nowhere near accurate enough.

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digikata
It's unlikely to be standard inertial navigation, mems sensors drift with dead
reckoning integration pretty quickly, even applying more sophisticated kalman
filtering may not improve things indoors without GPS (or sufficient travel for
GPS even if you could receive it consistently)... But, if you were to add
"room-like" assumptions it might improve things pretty well, eg. when
integrating a rotation, fit it to a 90 degree corner, similar with traversal,
fit it to travel along a wall. With those basic assumptions, I'm guessing you
can correct a lot of the raw integration drift. If this is true, my guess is
it would start break down in unconventional rooms - octagonal rooms, non
parallel walls, etc...

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marcosscriven
I wondered about doing something like this a while back - and it was the very
quick cumulative error from double integration of acceleration data that
stopped me from even trying. Clever idea getting the user to place the phone
on the walls - as you say that would correct a lot of the errors. But also, as
you say, unconventional room layouts get you back to square one so to speak.

~~~
digikata
I haven't played around with the latest generation of sensors, but if the
time/distance error growth is small enough, maybe you can get model
corrections down to the nearest 45 deg. If you can hit that threshold, you
might end up fairly functional with possibly the next largest segment of non-
rectangular rooms.

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bethn
Google's Project Tango
([https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/](https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/))
and Structure.io seem to be the most promising in this area.

I have difficulty seeing any professionals adopting RoomScan as it still seems
more difficult than just using a laser measure.

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dominotw
This would be nice if I can feed the output to my neato( or roomba).

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easy_rider
I got a lot more excited when I read about this a while ago (2012) [1]. It
also states to be slightly more accurate. It also seems less cumbersome.

[1] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/126843-think-gps-is-
cool-...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/126843-think-gps-is-cool-ips-
will-blow-your-mind)

I haven't tried anything, but it seems there are already lots of solutions and
this is just another approach.

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donut2d
AppStore link: [https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/roomscan-app-that-draws-
floo...](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/roomscan-app-that-draws-
floor/id571436618?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

Couldn't find it on my brief scan of the article.

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sdfjkl
I've tried this a while ago. Did not work very well at all on an iPhone 4S, it
would either tell me to re-try or come up with a plan that was completely off.

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choonkeat
"Your phone wasn't able to record all of the movement. Please try again"

can't get past 2 walls. iphone 4s

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wehadfun
HomeDepot should let people use this instead of charging 30 for a measure and
loosing it 3 months later

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kingkawn
I usually Look at it for a few seconds and then think about what I want to do
in there in my Brain.

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prody
Does anyone know how it actually works?

