Ok. SO I’ve used the 1st gen structure sensor for a number of years on an original 12.9” iPad Pro and its pretty good (I’ve posted here a long time ago on my experience and pros / cons). I have a 2020 iPad Pro now too but still use the structure on the original iPad (i havent upgraded to the gen 2 yet so have to take both iPads out with me), I use MagicPlan for my surveys and it is excellent on the new iPad.
Occipital’s Canvas software that you use with the structure sensor can now also use the Lidar sensor in the 2020 iPad Pro and the iPhone 12 Pro. I have had situations where the original iPad (with structure sensor) battery has depleted and I have used the Lidar in the new iPad to complete the survey.
Within the Canvas app the captured geometry (with the built-in Lidar scanner) is much lower resolution than the structure sensor captures and the associated processed texture and colorised scan is proportionally/significantly lower resolution too.
This I think is a software limitation partly because the captures I do with ‘3D Scanner’ app are extremely dense, high resolution meshes with high resolution texture atlases.
This, of course comes at a file size price. A room capture with Structure mesh may be in the order of 40mb plus a 20Mb texture atlas overhead when colorised (this step is done off device in the cloud for 2 dollars per scan).
A relatively small 3mm resolution Lidar detail scan (natively to the 3D Scanner app) can run into the hundreds of Mb’s. A room scan can easily be 1Gb or more - you can of course sacrifice resolution but once I got up to the 1Gb sort of scan size, the app is seems to be unstable and I had to delete the scans .
I must also point out I do not use any of the scans in SketchUp, I use them in Meshlab for measurement and reference purposes to ‘audit’ and add detail to my MagicPlan / Leica DISTO measured surveys.
I have found no benefit over the years for a direct use in SketchUp, its actually adds more complexity and overhead to constructing a model but as reference and measurement tools they are invaluable as you can capture ‘everything’ to support a measured and photographic survey.
One final point, the source scans from the Structure sensor are extremely accurate, for residential surveys, pretty much as accurate as my DISTO laser. Occipital do offer a scan to CAD service, where you can upload the scan to the cloud and a SketchUp file is produced for you, this uses some backend algorithms and processing as well as some human intervention but I have found from early experience that this introduced errors and inaccuracy from whatever approximation algorithms that are used and trying to track down where the error was introduced into the model often takes longer than actually building the model yourself from the very accurate source scan and whatever measured survey process you use.
I need to do some more testing with the Lidar scanner in regards to accuracy as I have only had to use it ‘in a pinch’
PS link to my original Structure topic…