RoomScan Pings Real Space With iPhone

If you've ever been in a situation where you needed to draw up a floor plan or recreate a room's dimensions, then you'll appreciate what RoomScan can do for you. This deceptively simple iOS app can do all that for you and all you need to do is tap on the walls.

RoomScan includes voice prompts to instruct you on what to do, but it's all rather simple. You simply walk around the room, tapping the Apple device to the wall and waiting for the beep before you proceed to the next wall. You have to be careful though to include each wall that you want to be detected, meaning all those angled walls and corners that matter.

The seemingly magical ability is thanks to an oft underrated feature in most devices today: the motion sensor. RoomScan notes the data recorded by the motion sensor every time it is placed on a wall. From this data, the position, orientation and distance of each wall is calculated to draw up an accurate floor plan, more or less. Of course, there will be some inaccuracies, but the app allows you to input your own figures into the floor plan afterwards.

RoomScan comes in two flavors, free and pro. The free version allows you to scan a single room, while the paid pro version opens up more possibilities. You can scan multiple rooms and have RoomScan stitch them up together to create one whole floor plan. You can even pick your own colors. Also in the Pro version, you can add doors as you go instead of dragging and dropping them to the finished floor plan like in the standard version. The timelapse video below demonstrates how to use RoomScan to quickly recreate a floor plan. Other demos can be found here.

RoomScan is available on iTunes but is only compatible with Apple devices that have motion sensors in them. It also requires that they be running iOS 7 or higher. To unlock all the features that this app has to offer, better purchase the Pro version that costs $4.99.

VIA: RoomScan