What does Apple RoomPlan detect?

RoomPlan is the Apple framework that PlaceAnew and many other iPhone room scanners are built on. It uses the camera, the LiDAR Scanner and trained models to describe a room.^[4] Knowing exactly what it sees tells you what any RoomPlan app can measure, and where an app has to add its own work.

Surfaces: the room's shell

RoomPlan's surface categories and the iOS 17 enhancements, from Apple's documentation and WWDC23.^[1][5]

Surface	What you get
Wall	Its size and position. Since iOS 17, slanted walls, curved walls and walls with a beam are handled, with the wall described as a polygon.
Door	Size and position, and whether it was open or closed when scanned.
Window	Size and position in its wall.
Opening	A gap in a wall with no door, such as an archway or a pass-through.
Floor	Since iOS 17, the floor's outline as a polygon.

Every surface and object also carries a confidence level, one of three, so an app knows how sure RoomPlan was.^[4]

Objects: the 16 kinds of furniture and fixtures

All 16 object categories in Apple's RoomPlan documentation. Each object is a box (a cuboid) with its dimensions.^[2][4]

Group	RoomPlan categories
Seating and tables	Sofa, chair, table
Bedroom and storage	Bed, storage
Kitchen	Refrigerator, stove, oven, dishwasher, sink
Bathroom and laundry	Toilet, bathtub, washer or dryer
Living room	Television, fireplace
Building	Stairs

Since iOS 17 RoomPlan also tells shapes apart within a kind, for example a single seat from an L-shaped sofa, and handles recessed dishwashers, ovens and sinks in kitchen runs.^[5]

Room types: five labels

Since iOS 17, RoomPlan can mark an area as a living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or dining room, or leave it unidentified. One open space can carry two labels, such as kitchen and dining room.^[3]

What RoomPlan does not detect

• Hallways, offices, laundries, closets, garages or a separate toilet as room types: only the five labels above exist.^[3]
• Desks, shelves, lamps, rugs, mirrors or artwork as their own kinds: they are outside the 16 categories.^[2]
• Outlets, switches, vents and pipes.
• Colours and materials. Surfaces and objects come with sizes, not finishes.
• A ceiling surface. The surface categories are wall, door, window, opening and floor.^[1]

What PlaceAnew adds on top

• A finished floor plan: walls straightened and joined, square footage for every room and the total, doors with their swings.
• More room names: from the bathroom fixtures, RoomPlan's label, the furniture (a bed, a washer, an oven) and the shape (a long narrow room is a hallway); see how rooms get named.
• Furniture you can read: plan symbols and 3D furniture instead of grey boxes.
• Floor colours read from the video of your scan, marked as an estimate when PlaceAnew is not sure of the floor type.
• Honest gaps: walls the scan could not see are drawn dashed.
• Fix with AI In testing: reads the scan's photos to name rooms, tidy walls and recognize furniture; see AI floor plan cleanup.
• Exports: PDF report, SVG drawing, DXF for CAD and USDZ 3D model.

Questions people ask