A few weeks ago, I bumped into a design industry acquaintance on the street, and he blew my mind by taking a picture of my feet.
From an article in Business of Home by Fred Nicolaus.
A little context: To explain how his startup was taking accurate kitchen measurements on the fly, my friend was demonstrating an iPhone app called Canvas that quickly generates 3D models. There was no kitchen handy on the sidewalk, so he waved his phone around and captured a few square feet of the pavement. Quickly, a strikingly detailed three-dimensional model began to appear on his screen—a few recycling bins here, a fence there, and my two feet centering the image in a dazzling little bit of digital magic. (Also, I wished I hadn’t been wearing sandals.)
The technology powering this kind of on-the-spot 3D modeling is lidar, short for “light detection and ranging.” It works by sending out invisible pulses of light that bounce back to a tiny sensor, which uses that information to calculate depth. Simplistically put: Cameras take 2D pictures; lidar takes 3D pictures.
Lidar is not new. In fact, the technology dates back to the 1960s. What is new, and what promises to change the design industry, is the fact that a lidar sensor now comes as a standard feature on the most advanced iPhones and iPads, and will likely be rolled out to a wider range of smartphones in the years ahead. When lidar is everywhere, a new suite of tools will emerge that are poised to change the way designers do business.
Canvas, a Colorado-based startup that specializes in imaging technology, is one of the most well-positioned to take advantage of the coming ubiquity of lidar. The company launched in 2016 with a set of software tools that allowed users to take an accurate 3D model of a room, with measurements that the company says are 99 percent accurate. (The designers I spoke with say the claim is justified.) Originally, Canvas’s technology required an expensive and somewhat clunky plug-in sensor that attached to an iPad. Now, the sensor is inside the phone.
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