People are excited about extended reality. They dream of having a Metaverse where they would spend their time and earn money. And one of the key aspects of the Metaverse is the virtual world itself. It may be designed by artists, created via procedural 3D modeling, or taken from the real world via scanning. The broader availability of consumer 3D scanning makes it one of the most promising ways for the massive generation of the Metaverse.
At WWDC 2022 Apple introduced RoomPlan API for Swift, which allows obtaining room scans using a camera and LiDAR on iPhone and iPad. This might look similar to the Scene Reconstruction API, which was introduced earlier and also uses LiDAR. It produces a polygonal mesh of the environment, which essentially provides information about the shape of the environment.
Apple events always amaze the entire world and 2020 was not the exception. Apple presented the first mobile devices equipped with LiDAR: iPad Pro 11 and iPhone 12 Pro (and PRO max version). This active sensor measures physical distances to the objects on a spatial two-dimensional grid. Nowadays it is widespread in the automotive area for object detection and collision avoidance.
