If you're a wanker like me and you have purchased on of Apple's overpriced telephones, you may know that it has a Lidar scanner built in. Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging is a similar technology to Radar- send out a wave, record how long it takes to come back, and use that to get an idea about how far the way the thing is. While Radar does this with radio waves, Lidar does this with lasers, which is both really cool and really expensive.

Mostly what your iPhone 12 Pro uses this for is adjusting the focus on poorly-lit photos of your drunken friends in the pub, but you can also use it to scan rooms, buildings, objects, and anything you can think of, creating a 3D structure known as a 'point cloud'.

When I found out about this I thought that, perhaps, there's a new form of photography to be discovered here. And so, I bought an iPhone 12 Pro for rather too much money, and thought about ways I could kick that off. Since I was writing the Screen Explosion at that point I immediately thought about adding it to that, and the Steam Workshop. And so, here we are.

Creating a scan that looks good isn't hard, but it can be time consuming, so I thought I'd write a guide for any other wankers out there with an iPhone 12 Pro (or indeed, iPhone 13 Pro, or any other phone released in the future that includes a Lidar scanner) who wanted to give it a shot.

First: buy an iPhone 12 Pro. Unless you are significantly richer than me this will seem like a very expensive purchase, but perhaps you can convince your significant other (or yourself) of how cool Lidar is and that you want to drop everything and become the Ansel Adams of Lidar Scans before anyone else does.

Or the Annie Leibovitz of Lidar. You could call yourself Scannie Leibovitz on Instagram.

That's a very good joke and I grant permission to use it under the MIT licence.

You could also buy a professional quality Lidar scanner, but this guide will assume you're using a very expensive telephone that can also run Jetpack Joyride when it's not making calls. If you buy a professional Lidar scanner then you'll just have to read the manual.

Second: go to the App Store and download the app 'SiteScape', which is free. There are two others apps called Polycam and Scaniverse that do the same job, and have some advantages, but SiteScape produces more pleasant images. Polycam also requires a subscription to export .PLY files, which is what this software uses.

Why choose SiteScape over Scaniverse or Polycam? Well, it mostly has to do with aesthetics. Lidar scans are naturally quite noisy- a whole bunch of rays get fired out, some of them hit something and come straight back, some of them get deflected, some of them take slightly interesting routes. You can deal with that noise in two ways: accept it, or process the result to eliminate as much as you can.

One of the major uses of Lidar is in measuring spaces for planning purposes. If you're doing that, you want as little noise as possible.

However, if you're just viewing the scans, getting rid of the noise gives a horrible plastic look, whereas keeping it makes things more impressionistic and pleasing on the eye. Fine detail is retained, and errors add interesting texture.

Hence the choice of SiteScape: it keeps the noise, whilst the other two process it away. By all means try both types of scanning out, but the noisy ones usually look better on screen.

To see the difference, compare this scan of a church in Tottenham with this scan of a George Harrison memorial in Chelsea . The former was done with Scaniverse, which flattens everything out; the latter with SiteScape, which keeps all the noise. Personally I think the second one looks much more interesting.

Once you've installed the application of your choice, try and scan something. It will probably look crap. Continue reading for some tips and tricks I've worked out while trying to avoid things looking crap.

So you've got your overpriced widget and you want to become Scannie Leibovitz on Instagram (seriously, this joke is top quality). So what now? Well the first thing to do is find something interesting to point your telephone at.

Please note: your penis is not interesting, and your friends' penises aren't either. Any penis scanned this way will show up only as a sad, pink smudge, so save yourself the effort and don't bother.

Lidar works best with large features- small details like leaves on plants and individual facial features tend to get lost, so you'll need to find something big enough to actually scan.

Another thing that won't work is landscape photography. The scanner has a range of about 5 meters / 16 feet, so anything too far away simply won't appear. You can, however, move through the scene to capture parts that are further away.

Good scans are also relatively busy. This can come from either the texture or the shape of the thing that you are scanning. Graffiti works quite well, but don't rely on it- after all, a photo of a painting is usually just a crap way of looking at the painting itself. Scenes with lots of objects at different heights are a lot of fun to look at too.

Reflective surfaces will give you predictably odd results, since Lidar works by bouncing light off things. As such, you may get strange results if you scan glass.

Direct sunlight also interferes with the scanner. It's only really an issue when the sun is highest in the sky, but if you're scanning in a very bright area it can be a struggle to get the surfaces to register.

Finally, anything you want to scan accurately needs to be relatively still. You'll need to move around to capture your subject from a variety of angles to get the full 3D impression, so if it's moving it's going to wind up looking very strange. This means if you're scanning something on a busy street, or an over-excited dog, or a choppy sea, a lot of noise is going to get in the final image. You can remove some of this with tools like Blender once the scan has been done, but it's a hassle.

In summary then, look for:

• Things that are big, but not too big
  
• Things that have a decent amount of colour, and large enough details to see when scanned
  
• Things that are relatively still.
  
• Things that aren't mirrors.
  
• Things that aren't bathed in sunlight

As with all photography these are more guidelines than anything, and you may be able to create something interesting by ignoring some of this advice. You'll need to experiment, but it's fun!

For this we need to export a .PLY file, which is the only file format currently supported. I may add others in the future, but frankly it's a hassle and .PLY files are fine. Both of the pieces of software mentioned earlier will export these quite happily.

Export the .PLY file to your computer, and open the Workshop Tools provided. You can do this via the settings app, or via the launch options that you're given when starting from the Steam Library view.



This will open The Jean-Paul Software Somewhat Ghetto Workshop Uploader Explosion. There's a good reason it looks a bit rough, which is originally I'd intended to build it into the settings app but then found I couldn't, so had to do the whole thing in C++. I do not recommend building UIs in C++. Ever wondered why a game has a crap UI? Well, now you know.

...

OK that's not the *only* possible reason for crap UI, but honestly it's a ton of extra misery.

*deep breath*

From the initial screen select 'Upload a new item...'


This will take you to the file select and edit screen. Click 'Select file...', select the .PLY file from your computer, and wait for it to load. This could take a few seconds depending on how big it is. Here's an example with one of those delicious, copyright-skirting "Southern" "Fried" "Chicken" shops that we have all over London.


Use the controls to centre the model in view. This is important! If it's off to one side it won't display properly in the app. You can click 'auto-centre' to move the model approximately into the centre, then the 'x', 'y' and 'z' controls to tweak the positioning.

If you've been using Scaniverse, or another app that isn't SiteScape, it's possible your model will appear sideways, like this:


This happens because some people choose to use the 'Z' axis of a space to point forward, and some people choose to use the 'Z' axis to point up. Why some people do that latter is beyond me, but at a guess I'd say: probably daddy issues. Anyway, if your scan is perverted, click the 'toggle axes fix' button to slap it back into decent society.


Much better, you can see the squirrels now.

The other thing you'll need to provide is a preview image that will be displayed on the workshop. You can either click 'create preview image', which will take a shot from the current camera position, or upload your own.

Once you've centred the model in the space, fixed the axes if required, and selected or generated a preview image, it's time to give it a name and location so people know what they're looking at. Click 'next', which will take you to this screen.


Fill in the details. Give it a nice title, add the location you scanned it, and write a brief description. You can also add optional tags if you want to make things more discoverable. Once happy, click 'Start upload!' to start the upload! Once finished, you'll be automatically subscribed to the item, and Steam should start downloading it.

You can then go back to the start, and upload another. If you want to edit one you've previously uploaded- for example to tweak the positioning, or replace the tags, or even the model and preview image, select it from the list shown on this screen once uploaded.

And that's it! Happy scanning, and let me know in the comments if there are any bugs.

Honestly, just google Annie Leibovitz, she's a legendary photographer and that is a brilliant joke. If you're a journalist looking for an angle on this bit of software, be sure to use it, you'll probably get an award, or if in the UK, a Knighthood.