Step one · working today
The dearer iPhones since 2020 carry a tiny laser scanner next to the camera. Walk slowly around a picnic table with one, and the phone measures millions of points on its surface. Bring that home to an ordinary computer, and free, open software turns it into a proper drawing with dimensions on it, the same kind of file a draftsperson or engineer opens every day. No cloud account, no subscription, no data leaving the island.
Plain words first
Four steps, and only the first one happens outdoors. Everything technical hides behind the blue folds; click them open if you want the machinery.
The scanner is called LiDAR: light detection and ranging. The phone sends out a grid of harmless invisible light pulses and times how long each one takes to bounce back, like counting the echo off a cliff face, except it happens millions of times a second. Each timed bounce becomes a point in space. At a metre or two of range the points land within about a centimetre of the truth, roughly the width of your little fingernail.
All those points together are called a point cloud: a swarm of dots hanging in space, like a photograph you can walk through. The processing software (Open3D and friends, all open source) cleans the cloud, joins the dots into a continuous surface called a mesh, and only then starts measuring.
The phone's scans are already close to true size, usually within about one percent. For hobby models that is plenty. For engineering it must be proven, so the pipeline takes your tape measurements, compares them against the same spans in the scan, and solves for the best correction. Every export then carries a scale report: which distances were checked, how far out each one was before and after, in millimetres. An engineer reading the drawing can decide in five seconds whether to trust it.
Everything exports to open formats: DXF for CAD drawings (plan plus cross-sections, on proper named layers, with dimension lines), OBJ and GLB for 3D models, PLY and LAS for the raw point clouds, and a JSON record card carrying the measurements, condition notes, location, consent note and scale report. DWG for older AutoCAD workflows comes via a one-step free converter. Nothing is locked to any vendor.
Every scan is processed once and comes out at four weights, so the same picnic table serves a map pin, a web page, an archive and a tender document.
| Level | What it is | What it serves |
|---|---|---|
| LOD 0 | Bounding box and footprint outline | Map pins, asset registers |
| LOD 1 | Light 3D model, under 15,000 triangles | Web pages, memory palaces, phones |
| LOD 2 | Full-detail cleaned model | The archive, film and simulation |
| LOD 3 | Point cloud plus dimensioned DXF drawings | Engineering, tenders, fabrication |
What it's for
The same pipeline runs in three modes, tuned for three very different island jobs.
Mode one · public assets
Picnic tables, bubblers, barbecues, toilets, halls, club gear. Each scan produces oriented dimensions, a condition note, a footprint for the map and a light model for the web, in one pass. A community that keeps this register current is handing its council something councils normally pay consultants for: knowing exactly what is out there and what shape it is in.
Mode two · engineering
The worked example is the Windemere skate bowls: scan the bowls in overlapping passes, cut vertical sections through the transitions, and produce dimensioned drawings of what actually exists today. That is the starting document every serious repair or rebuild tender needs, and it usually costs thousands to commission. The drawing pipeline is built and tested; scanning the actual bowls is still to come. The tender-side thinking lives in the Windemere tender workspace.
Mode three · projection art
For projection art events, the pipeline measures how flat a wall or surface really is, reports whether it is suitable, and hands the projection artist a clean outline of the usable area. That turns a night of guesswork into an afternoon of setup.
Where it's at
Said plainly, so nobody has to guess.