There's a whole category of excellent iPhone 3D-capture apps — Polycam is probably the best known — that turn a walkthrough into a detailed textured mesh or point cloud. We get asked how Scanstead compares. The answer: they're built for different questions.
Mesh apps answer "what does it look like?"
Photogrammetry and LiDAR-mesh capture reproduce surfaces: every bump of the sofa, the clutter on the counter, the texture of the brick. The output is a visual twin — fantastic for showcasing a space, documenting a site's condition, or pulling a prop into a 3D tool.
But a mesh doesn't know it contains a wall. Want the wall's length? You pick two points by eye and hope you clicked the actual corners. Want wall area minus openings? You're doing manual segmentation. The mesh has millions of triangles and zero opinions about what any of them are.
Scanstead answers "what are the dimensions?"
Scanstead's capture is parametric: the output is walls, doors, windows, and rooms as first-class objects, each with dimensions attached. Floor area, perimeter, wall heights, opening sizes — extracted automatically because the model knows what everything is. Shared walls between rooms get deduplicated; a mesh can't even express that idea.
That's also why the models are clean and light: a house is a few hundred surfaces you can spin on a phone in a client meeting, not a half-gigabyte mesh.
And when you want the visual too, High Fidelity mode projects real photos onto the parametric surfaces — the look of a mesh capture on a model that still measures itself.
The one-line version
If the deliverable is a visual — a showcase, a texture reference, an art asset — a mesh app is the right tool. If the deliverable is a number — a bid, a takeoff, a floor plan — you want the app whose model knows what a wall is.