This week at the Niantic Lightship Summit, we released improvements to the quality and speed of our reconstruction algorithms and showed a preview of our upcoming Scanning Framework. Read on to learn more.

Detail Mode just got better

We’re constantly improving our algorithms in an ongoing quest for realism. Scaniverse 1.9, which is now available on the App Store, is the latest step in this process. We’ve introduced some major improvements to Detail Mode, including:

• Increasing the resolution of our depth maps by nearly 2x, allowing for more accurate reconstruction of thin and detailed surfaces.

• Improving the coverage and completeness of our depth estimation, eliminating most cases where scans could end up with holes in textureless areas.

• Optimizing the Detail Mode reconstruction pipeline to run 10% faster on average than in Scaniverse 1.8.

Scans processed in Detail Mode are more realistic, contain fewer artifacts, and finish processing faster than ever before — in many cases, you can process a 3D scan into a textured 3D model on your phone in under a minute. Check out this video to see some beautiful scans created with this update:

Coming soon: the Scanning Framework

We created Scaniverse because we believe that anyone should be able to create 3D content for AR, VR, and the Metaverse. This same motivation is behind the Scanning Framework, which will allow developers to embed customizable 3D scanning experiences directly into their apps, making it easy for end users to generate 3D content and create experiences using the Lightship Visual Positioning System.

The framework will work on both Android and iOS, and will not require LiDAR. We’ve made some great progress to date, and will have something you can try yourself in the near future. We can wait to see what you’ll create.