Walk a room with a LiDAR iPhone to produce a scan that imports onto the web floor plan as ordinary geometry you correct before it commits.
Loading…
The iPhone field app can turn a walk through a building into a starting floor plan, instead of one drawn from memory after the visit. Walk the rooms, and the scan imports onto the web as ordinary editable geometry that a person anchors and corrects before anything is saved.
Room scanning needs an iPhone with a LiDAR scanner — an iPhone 12 Pro or a later Pro model — running iOS 17 or later, with the Coffee Table Tactics field app installed and signed in. The field app isn't in the App Store; it's available on request at hello@coffeetabletactics.com.
On an iOS version older than 17, the scan card states the requirement instead of offering a scan. The app can't check for the LiDAR scanner before you try, so on iOS 17 or later it offers the scan and states the requirement beside it. On a phone without the scanner, the scan stops and says so rather than producing a worse scan.
On the home screen, tap Scan a building. A scan is a record about a building rather than one incident, so the first step is choosing the building: search the list by address and tap one, or tap New building, type its address, and tap Add building. The list holds your department's buildings, the same building records pre-plans use, and the scans you take from there file against the building you chose. A chip near the top of the screen names the department the scans file to.
Before the app scans a building, it needs permission on file from someone who can give it: the owner, an adult who lives there, the owner's agent, the person running the business there, or someone else whose reason you record. Tap Get permission to open the form. It asks who is giving permission, how and why they can give it, a phone number or email (optional), what you may scan, and anything you may not. Under Read these to them, it lists what to tell them, with a box to tick for each one, then takes their signature on the phone. Tap Save permission to keep it.
One signed form covers every scan you take at that building on the same visit, for up to 12 hours, so you don't sign again for a second room. If permission for the building is withdrawn, the phone won't scan under that form or any form signed before it, and asks you to get permission again.
Tap Scan a room, walk the room slowly, and point the phone at every wall. The scan card sets expectations before you start: scans work best one floor at a time, in rooms with the lights on, and a large or commercial building is best scanned in sections. In a dark room, tap Light to turn on the phone's flashlight.
When you've covered the room, tap Finish to stop capturing. Then tap Add Another Room to Scan to add the next room to the same scan, tap Finish again to save the scan and send it, or tap Discard to throw it away. Discard asks you to confirm first, because the room would have to be walked again.
Tap Photo at any point during the walk to picture a panel, an FDC, a hazard, or anything else worth flagging; the scan keeps running. The shutter doesn't ask for a label, so you don't lose the moment. Each photo records where the phone was in the scan and which way it faced.
Label photos afterward, if you want to; a label is optional and never holds up an upload. While a scan is still on the phone waiting to be sent, tap one of its photos in the list and pick Panel, FDC, Shutoff, Knox box, Hazard, or Other, with an optional note. Once a scan has been sent, anyone with edit access can label its photos on the web, from the scan's row.
The phone saves every scan before it tries to send it, so a scan that can't upload waits on the phone instead of being lost. To see waiting scans, tap Scan a building and pick a building; every scan waiting on the phone is listed on the scan card, whichever building it's for. The phone tries again each time that card opens and whenever the app comes back to the foreground with it open, and a retry sends only the files that didn't arrive the first time. From the list:
A waiting scan keeps the department it was captured for. If the phone is now filing into another department, the scan waits without being sent, and its row names the department to switch back to. Change building isn't offered for that scan.
A building's filed scans are listed on its pre-plan, and on the floor-plan tab of an incident whose address matches the building. With edit access, you can import a scan onto a floor from its row. A few things carry over:
Nothing from an import is saved until you save it. On a pre-plan, closing without saving discards the import; on an incident, one undo takes the whole import back. Each scan's row also names the permission it was taken under.
View mesh on a scan's row opens the scan's own 3D capture in the browser, next to the floor plan, so you can check the plan against the shape the phone captured. It's often untextured gray geometry rather than a photographic model. When a scan has no 3D model, View mesh is unavailable, and the row says the measurements still import.
When you open the scene editor on an incident that has a scan on file for it or its address, and the canvas has no walls yet, the editor offers to build the walls, doors, and doorways from the scan instead of starting blank. See Build the house in the scene editor for what happens after you accept.