ICIDO

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Blog article2 min read

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.

A point cloud is not a map

Sweep an iPhone across a room and you get a dense scattering of measured points. It looks impressive. It is almost useless.

Nothing in that cloud says this is a wall or this is the way out. There are no rooms, no doorways, no floor — only positions. Everything that makes a place navigable has to be worked out from the arrangement of those points.

Finding the structure

Some of what a scan captures will still be true next year. Most of it will not. The useful work is telling them apart.

  • Large flat runs of points, standing vertically, behave like walls
  • A gap in an otherwise continuous wall behaves like a threshold — a way through
  • The broad horizontal plane under everything is the floor, and a route has to lie on it
  • A cluster of points at seat height in the middle of the room is a chair, and a chair is not architecture
Three panels showing the same room. The first, raw returns, is a scatter of loose points roughly outlining the walls with stray points in the middle. The second, structure, has those points resolved into four solid wall lines with a gap in the bottom wall marked as a threshold. The third, route, keeps the walls in grey and adds a path that runs down from inside the room and out through that gap.
The stray points in the first panel are furniture. They do not survive into the second.

ICIDO keeps the first three and discards the fourth.

What survives a scan is the geometry that will still be there when you come back.

That choice has a practical consequence: routing around furniture that has since been moved would be worse than not knowing about it at all. A map that confidently steers you around a table which is no longer there has actively misled you.

Thresholds are the hard part

Walls are comparatively easy. Openings are where it gets interesting, because an opening is defined by absence — it is where the wall stops being there.

Get it wrong in one direction and the map thinks a solid wall has a door in it. Get it wrong in the other and a real doorway is invisible, so every route treats the room as sealed. Both failures are obvious the moment you try to walk the result, which is precisely why walking the result matters more than admiring the point cloud.

One coordinate frame, several floors

Rooms scanned separately are not much use if they float independently. ICIDO locks scanned levels into a shared coordinate frame, so a building becomes one continuous interior rather than a set of unrelated rooms — and a route can cross a floor, find the stairwell, and keep going up.

The home page has a diagram of this that you can scrub through, if you would rather see it than read about it.

And then the route

Once the geometry is understood, a path becomes a real question with a real answer. It has to lie on the floor, pass through openings that actually exist, keep sensible clearance from what is really in the way, and lead somewhere you asked to go.

Three ICIDO app screens side by side. The first is scanning a room: a wireframe of the walls and floor seen through the camera with mesh triangles resolving across it, and a panel reading surfaces captured, walls, floor, furniture. The second is the position fix: a top-down floor plan with a marker and a heading cone, labelled Studio located, position fixed, heading 41 degrees. The third is navigation: the floor in perspective with a wide glowing route running away from the viewer past two pieces of furniture, a mini-map in the corner, and a panel reading destination, printer, 12 metres.
The same three steps in the app itself: capture the geometry, recognise the place, then walk the route.

ICIDO draws that path onto the floor through the live camera and counts the remaining distance down as you walk. The overlay hides correctly behind real objects, because a route that appears to pass through a wall is not a route anyone should trust.

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