As your aim the
camera at corners of the room and align the three axis gizmo on the screen with
the corner, the app measures rotation and tilt to figure out the distance. There is an ability to calibrate the app, that
is enter a true distance in place of a distance it measured and have it
recalibrate itself to that.
You can also measure
an entire floor plan, that is multiple rooms with the app. Go from one room to another and tell it
points in common with each (such as a door opening), and you can begin to build
the entire floor plan of your house with all the associated distances.
The app offers a
series of tutorials on how to use the different features and allows you to save
and store multiple floor plans on your device.
By creating a simple free account with Magic Plan, you have the ability
to email your plan to yourself (or anyone else) as a PDF, JPG, DXF or
webpage. This could allow you to field
measure something (assuming you calibrated your device) and then email yourself
an ACAD compatible plan.
Anyone who has spent
time field measuring knows that it is a tricky and lengthy process involving
lots of sheets of paper, a pencil, tape measure, and all sorts of other
miscellaneous objects. Now perform all
your field measuring on one device. Even
if you chose to do it this way, it probably won't be as accurate as measuring
with a tape or a laser disto, but it can make it much easier to perform those
long distance measurements.
I haven't used the
app enough to figure out what the tolerance of error may be, but for small
scale indoor stuff, it may well be within a range that is acceptable. Use this app in conjunction with other apps,
like 360 to take panoramic photos of the room after you measure it, and give
yourself and your drafter a powerful arsenal of tools to field measure and take
photos.
Who else has run
across the laser disto that talks directly to Revit running on a nearby
laptop? The tutorials are really neat to
watch, and can blow this app out of the water.
