How to Scan a Multi-Room House with LiDAR in Under 10 Minutes

Scanning a full house — multiple rooms, hallways, stairwells, and closets — sounds daunting. But with the right technique, a confident LiDAR operator can capture 2,000–3,000 sq ft in under 10 minutes and produce a floor plan accurate to within half an inch.

This guide covers the exact workflow our most productive users follow, from prepping the device to exporting a finished floor plan. (Scanning for a specific trade? See how insurance adjusters, real estate agents and home inspectors fit it into their visits.)

Preparing Your Device and Space

Before you start, make sure your iPhone (12 Pro or later) has at least 30% battery and 2 GB of free storage. LiDAR generates dense point clouds, and running out of space mid-scan forces a restart. Connecting a MagSafe battery pack for long scans is a pro move.

In the room, open blinds and turn on lights. LiDAR works in the dark, but ambient light improves the RGB camera texture used for room recognition. Cover large mirrors and glass surfaces with a sheet or cardboard — highly reflective surfaces create phantom walls and gaps.

Open vPlan AR, tap Scan, and hold your iPhone at chest height. Let the app initialize for 3–5 seconds until the AR grid appears on the floor.

The Room-by-Room Scanning Strategy

Start with the largest room in the house. Walk the full perimeter first, keeping the device 3–4 feet from each wall. You'll see the floor plan outline forming in real time on the AR overlay. Once the perimeter is captured, do one slow pass through the center of the room.

Move to adjacent rooms in a connected sequence — don't jump across the house. Open doorways between rooms while scanning; the app uses the doorway geometry as a reference to stitch rooms together automatically. Keeping doorways open during the scan is one of the single biggest accuracy improvements you can make.

For hallways, walk the length with the device facing sideways at each wall, pausing briefly at every doorway. Hallways are narrow, so the LiDAR sensor captures both walls simultaneously — a single slow pass is usually sufficient.

Handling Difficult Areas

Stairwells are the trickiest area. Scan from the bottom landing first with the device angled upward at about 30°, then walk up slowly and scan the top landing. When the lower floor is complete, tap "Add Another Level" to begin the upper floor scan.

Closets shorter than 3 feet wide are hard for LiDAR to capture cleanly. Scan the opening from outside (point the device straight in), then step in and do a quick 180° sweep from inside if the space permits. Tight spaces often require a manual correction in the editor afterward.

Built-in furniture like kitchen islands or bathroom vanities can confuse wall detection. After the scan, check these areas in the floor plan editor and delete or adjust any wall segments that were detected in the wrong place.

A Realistic Time Budget

Knowing how long each space should take keeps you moving. As a rule of thumb, a bedroom or office takes 60–90 seconds, a kitchen or living room one to two minutes, a hallway 30 seconds, a bathroom under a minute, and a closet 15–30 seconds. A typical 2,000–3,000 sq ft single-level home adds up to roughly 8–12 minutes of scanning.

If one room is taking much longer than that, you are probably moving too quickly and backtracking. Slow, steady movement is faster overall than a quick pass followed by re-scans.

Scanning More Than One Floor

Scan one level at a time. When the first floor is complete, tap "Add Another Level" after the scan finishes and start the next floor. Each level keeps its own elevation, and the 3D view stacks the levels together so you can check that stairwells and exterior walls line up.

In the web editor, the Levels tab offers presets — Basement, Main Level, Level 2, Level 3 and Attic — and you can edit any level's name, elevation and ceiling height afterward. Basements are recognized as below grade from their elevation, which matters later if you produce a square footage (GLA) report.

Five Habits That Save Re-Scans

Keep interior doors open so the scanner can see how rooms connect. Pause for a beat at every corner and doorway. Stay about 3–4 feet from walls — closer than about 1.5 feet and the sensor struggles. Cover or avoid pointing directly at mirrors and large glass. And finish each room completely before moving to the next one rather than leaving gaps to "come back to."

Those five habits eliminate most of the missing-wall and misaligned-corner problems people fix in the editor afterward.

Reviewing and Generating Your Floor Plan

Tap "Finish Scan" when you've captured every room. The app processes the raw LiDAR data into a structured floor plan — this takes 10–30 seconds depending on the size of the scan. Review the generated floor plan on screen, zooming in to check that all walls, doorways, and windows are correctly detected.

Use the editor tools to fix any gaps, straighten walls that captured at a slight angle, or add rooms that were missed. For a 2,000 sq ft home, most users spend 3–5 minutes on post-scan corrections.

When the plan looks right, tap Export to generate a PDF, DXF, or XML file. The entire process from arrival on site to a finished, shareable floor plan typically takes 12–15 minutes.