Drawing on a live camera without cooking the phone
The rules that keep ICIDO's navigation overlays cheap - one publish at 30 Hz, no blur filters, simplified outlines - were all written after a real device overheated.
Writing
The ICIDO journal
How indoor mapping actually works, what we are learning from the buildings we scan, and where accessible navigation goes next.
17 posts
Deleting the 370 MB model, and what still works
ICIDO carried a 370 MB vision model for iPhones without Apple Intelligence. It has been removed. What that changes, what it does not, and why the build now refuses an older SDK.
The app lost you and said nothing
Three passes over what ICIDO says when nobody is looking at the screen: silent tracking states, unlabelled buttons, and a first screen that broke at the largest text size.
The map knows where, the camera knows what
How ICIDO decides whether a spoken question is answered by the saved floor plan, by text recognition, or by a vision model - and why some questions get two answers.
Putting separate maps on one site plan
Each ICIDO scan has its own origin. Arranging several of them on one site plan meant placing them by hand first, then from saved coordinates and a recorded north.
The map was flat and the house had two floors
A single scan spanning two storeys broke a top-down map with no vertical axis. Four builds of causes: a floor that won the vote, staircases read as walls, a storey dropped at save time.
When places sit side by side instead of stacked
A garage, a parking lot and a house are peers, not floors. How ICIDO groups them as one site by reusing machinery it already had.
What it takes to remove one chair from a map
Update Map now removes furniture that has moved away. Four builds and four measurements got there, each one aimed at not deleting a glass barrier.
Absence of return is not evidence of absence
A requested feature - deleting furniture an update finds gone - was built, measured against glass, and reverted before it shipped. Plus an undo for map updates.
Deciding where to go on the map, not before it
Three ICIDO builds turned the mini-map into the thing you act on: open it full screen, name a spot from across the room, pick a destination on it.
Onboarding that runs on the real app, not a mock
First-run onboarding used to be a simulation of ICIDO. Recent builds replaced it with a coach that spotlights real controls and advances only when the user does the step.
Two weeks of taking things out of ICIDO
A run of recent builds deleted a chooser dialog, four tutorial steps, a settings picker and most of the on-screen text. What went, and why removal counted as progress.
Joining two scans that don't share an origin
Two rooms scanned separately have two unrelated origins. Recent builds combine them by their overlapping shape, and hand the choice over when the geometry is ambiguous.
Clearance, stairs, and the routes people actually take
The shortest path and the usable path are frequently not the same path. Here is how ICIDO handles that — and why it never asks you for a diagnosis to work it out.
Why your scans never leave your iPhone
A scan of a building is a description of the inside of a building. That is why there is no upload step in ICIDO — and why there is nothing to opt out of.
From a cloud of points to a place you can walk through
A scan starts as thousands of unconnected measurements. Turning that into something you can route through means deciding what counts as structure and what is just furniture that will have moved by tomorrow.
What a LiDAR sensor actually measures
It does not take a picture. It sends out light and times how long the light takes to come back — and that one measurement, repeated thousands of times, is what makes an indoor map possible.