You know it would also be useful to work in reverse. I get frusterated when house listings don’t include a floor plan. How cool if a program could go through the photos and guess a floor plan. Obviously a hard problem.
For people who have physical access to a property, I wonder if you could use a variant of SLAM like the robot vacs - maybe hack one of those laser tape measures to plug into your phone as you walk around the house.
I have an application however where I want to be able to capture an outdoor forest scene with a video camera and convert that to a video game/simulation scene which renders efficiently. It turns out that is a more challenging problem that actually no one has solved as far as I know.
There’s lots of neat research tho and it will be possible some day. This bit of research is pretty cool: https://youtu.be/JuH79E8rdKc
It's not automatic of course, but you can do it pretty discretely and cover a whole house with measurements in ~ 10 minutes. I did it every single time when we were looking at houses.
Also always brought a powerful flashlight and a small spirit level.
However, if the global camera poses are available, we can detect surfaces in photos and project them reasonably well into 3D. In the past, I have used this work to achieve something similar: https://github.com/NVlabs/planercnn
I believe it can also use the LiDAR sensor in newer phones, but I haven't tested that.
An easier sell than Matterport, which (IIRC) is a $5K camera. FloPlan just charges a per-plan price (again, IIRC).
If you want the generic service, you have to go to Cubi Casa.
https://matterport.com/gallery/bclm-tollhouse
The "dollhouse" view is really handy for being able to get a sense of the space.
The earliest I am aware of was a specialized mini "cart" studded with video cameras that one would roll around the place and will get a textured 3D model that can then be walked around, Doom-style. It was made by a Vancouver startup was back in mid '00s.
There is also a specialized handheld "scanner" gadget that was marketed towards police use for capturing crime scene details. You'd just wave it around and see the resulting 3D phtogrammetry capture in real-time. Missed a bit - go back a wave a bit more. This was in the early '10s.
I'd imagine that this has been ported to smartphones already, because they now have sufficient sensor, storage and processing capacity for that.
I definitely feel like no one has won the market yet. Having something available or somewhat good isn't market dominance.
Or what Neato does with all these floor plans on their servers ...
It also seems to focus on creating 3D models of things and not spaces.
About twenty years ago I worked for a big box store's corporate headquarters. One of my tasks was to add new stores to MapBlast so they would show up on the "Find a store" section of our website. Problem was that often stores were built in new sections of rapidly growing sprawl so the streets weren't in MapBlast yet. I'd have to make educated guesses as where to put the store on the map. Sometimes I could call the store and get some help that way but for our international stores, that was difficult because of the language barrier. We knew that there was some department somewhere in the company that had detailed drawings of each store, including precise location coordinates but the company was so large, we had no clue where to even begin to find that department.
This can detect rooms as polygons, doors/windows as line segments and bounding boxes around objects (e.g. cabinets, sinks etc. indicated on floorplans).