Category: CAD

Polycam, my favorite room and home interior capture software, has suddenly gotten even better. The latest version, called Polycam Vision 25, introduces a host of improvements to their already brilliant scanning software that should make anyone who measures for floor plans drop and forget their tape measures.

With Polycam you can get all the measurements of a room  —  plus other rooms, the whole floor, in fact  — simply by waving your iPhone around. Truth be told, it takes a more deliberate scanning, more like painting a room up and down (with very broad strokes) than waving it willy-nilly. Point is: you don’t have to spend hours, be on your hands and knees, using a tape measure.

Scanning a room can literally take less than a minute. The largest house, a sprawling 2-story dream house, took me less than half an hour.

“These are more than just incremental upgrades,’ says Chris Heinrich, Co-Founder and CEO of Polycam; they’re a rethinking of how 3D creation can solve real-world challenges. By giving professionals the ability to capture, document, and collaborate with speed and accuracy, we’re helping them move from concept to execution faster and with more confidence than ever before.

Key New Features in Vision 25

1. Space Mode – detailed capture of 3D space, like the insides and walls of a room, in a single unified model, using LiDAR-equipped iOS devices (late models of iPhones and iPads), containing:
   1. Instantly generates textured 3D models
   2. Vectorized simplified models
   3. 2D-floor plans
2. Scene Editor – Allows combination and customization of multiple 3D scans:
   • Merges different captures into a unified scene, ideal for large-scale projects, such as apartment buildings with several floors.
   • It includes layers, enabling users to toggle on and off floor plans, 3D meshes, furnishings, etc.

3. Spatial Report – AI-driven automated documentation:
   • Generates PDF summaries with key spatial data (measurements, total volume, wall areas, etc.).
   • Achieves 99.3% accuracy, which compares favorably with professional LiDAR equipment.

Additional Professional Enhancements

• Advanced Floor Plans – Customizable settings in Business Plans, allowing:

4. Adjustments for wall thickness.
5. More detailed interior measurements.
6. Saved Measurements – Dimensions can now be preserved and shared for team collaboration.
   • Cloud Space Processing – High-resolution LiDAR processing in the cloud allows for speed and greater precision with sharper details, particularly for large spaces.
7. 3D File Export (Professional version) has expanded support for:
   • CAD, Xactimate, and BIM formats
   • Object Mode Enhancements – Improved usability for individual object scanning using photogrammetry and Gaussian splats.

Polycam is the most widely used scanning software in the world, and with the above improvements, it is easily the most capable and easiest to use of any app for Apple devices. I am drawing this conclusion after trying several of them. Polycam also has a pricing model that is easiest to swallow for individuals and small businesses: the Pro plan is $144/yr for unlimited use. Once you pay it, there are no limits to its use for the year. It’s like paying once for unlimited trips to the buffet. This is in contrast to most pricing schemes that charge per use or per project, which is a barrier, even if small, to be considered every time.

It is these advantages that have contributed to Polycam’s success and market penetration. The company claims over half of all Fortune 500 companies use Polycam and over 2 billion square feet (over 41 thousand football fields). Polycam is also getting a lot of use scanning objects, as seen on the company’s continually growing library of scans, and claims to have processed almost 10 million objects in 2024 alone. It should be noted, however, that most users are probably using the free version of Polycam

All the news about semiconductors may be about NVIDIA, but it should be known that AMD, NVIDIA’s leading competitor, is not standing still. They are on the show floor at 3DXW25, the annual SolidWorks Conference, in at least two booths: their own and HP’s.

At HP, we see a giant tractor-trailer, an assembly of thousands of parts, being twirled around. That glitch-free display might be expected on a workstation packed with GPUs – but this is happening on a thin, light laptop, the 14-inch HP ZBook. Is there a cloud connection and GPUs behind the curtain? Nope. All the computing is being done locally.

That amount of graphic processing being done could be overheating the CPU, GPU or whatever in in that little laptop. Yet the Z-book shows no sign of smoke and is cool to touch. In fact, the Z-book is hardly straining. We hear it can go on like this for 14 hours on a charge, though it’s hard to believe that it would last that long with a graphically intense SW session.

It’s all being done with AMD’s latest SOC, or system on a chip, the AMD Ryzen Pro, a marvel of technology on the head of a pin. Okay, it may be on a big thumbtack. HP would not let us pry open the laptop to see the chip.

As Apple did with the M series SOCs, the Ryzen combines CPU, GPU and NPU (neural processing unit) functionality all on one chip. This way, no data has to travel on buses, which is faster and generates less heat.

We also wondered about the cooling channels, and it was explained to us that the cooling was done with two fans. Underneath, about half of the ZBook’s bottom is perforated with holes. Slits along the back is where heat is exhausted. The fans could not be heard over the ambient noise on the show floor.

The Ryzen works by allocating up to 96GB of video RAM.

To get this much horsepower would take $10,000, we hear – and not fit in the laptop’s form factor.

Prefer to work in the office? HP has downsized the workstation for you. It now fits in a small black rectangular cube that can be mounted anywhere, even hidden under the desk or hung off the back of a monitor. We’ve seen tiny workstations before, but the G1a is the first to include the power supply, which is normally an ungainly brick kept hidden behind the curtain at a demo.