Synergizing LiDAR and Augmented Reality for precise real-time interior distance measurements for mobile devices

The emergence and widespread usage of mobile devices have revolutionized the field of Augmented Reality (AR), allowing the technology to grow rapidly, and attracting significant attention from different businesses such as e-commerce, healthcare, education, and many more. AR mainly allows spatial recognition and measurements of objects in and of the environment. The integration of AR drastically improves user immersion in contrast to conventional methods. However, the accuracy of spatial measurements with AR is still limited, due to the lack of 3D information. The introduction of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors in Apple’s mobile devices presents a new opportunity to enhance the overall performance of AR applications. In this work, we explore the potential and feasibility of spatial measurements by combining AR technology with LiDAR technology. Hence, we developed a custom AR application using LiDAR data for real-time interior measurements on a mobile device by integrating the point clouds captured by the LiDAR sensor in an AR measurement environment. Further, we carried out a comparison between our custom application and three conventional applications for spatial measurement on the market. With an error value of 0.45 percent, the accuracy during spatial measurements of our application is about one order of magnitude higher than the accuracy of the compared applications. In this work, we provide insights into the development and potential of LiDAR sensors in mobile devices, especially for accurate and real-time operating applications.