I spent yesterday at the 2024 IAFSM Conference in San Diego, talking shop with some of the most sophisticated scanner specialists in the world. I had the honor of presenting the results of some recent scan-based photogrammetry experiments and had the opportunity to attend Eugene Liscio’s presentation on the state of Recon-3D, his iPhone-based scanning tool.

If you're not familiar with the technology, the app utilizes Apple’s LiDAR sensor (available on iPhone 12 Pro/Max and up and many iPads) in conjunction with the camera to perform LiDAR-assisted photogrammetry, yielding point clouds that look like this:

Recon-3D data of a Honda Civic destroyed by the talented crew at SATAI.

The app maximizes potential accuracy with the use of AprilTags, which are used to set scale. They can be purchased here, or printed from the app. Several studies have investigated the accuracy of the tool, including this one by Seth Miller, et al., and this one by Stephanie Stevenson and Eugene Liscio. Other papers are in the pipeline and should be published early next year.

The brilliant Jarrod Carter also presented the findings related to one of his experiments where his group compared vehicular measurements acquired with Recon-3D to those captured with Leica's RTC360. In short, JC found Recon-3D to perform very well, with 95% of points being within 10 mm of the RTC360 data, and 80% being within 5 mm. He presents the results in the video below.

At $499/yr, it’s worth considering, in my humble opinion... especially if you're not in a position to spend big money on a traditional scanner. While I won’t be chucking our RTC360s anytime soon, I find it to be a great complementary tool and am intrigued by what the future will bring.

Thanks for reading, keep exploring!

Lou Peck
​Lightpoint | Axiom

P.S. If you're interested in honing your motorcycle recon skills and stacking ACTAR CEUs (up to 31), I'll be teaching an online version of my motorcycle course next month! All the details are here.