A Real-World 3D Capture Test: Scanning an Apartment in About 15 Minutes with TourPop 3D

When you look at several apartments in the same day, they can start to blur together.

Which bedroom had the better window? Was the kitchen in the second apartment actually bigger? Would a desk fit beside the bed, or did it just look like there was enough room?

Photos and video are useful, of course. But after a few property visits, they don't always make it easy to remember how one room connects to another.

That was the reason behind this small field test.

A colleague was looking for a two-bedroom apartment close to our office. A local agent had a vacant apartment available for viewing, so we decided to treat it like a normal property visit — with one extra step.

We brought a TourPop 3D spatial capture camera and captured the apartment while we were there.

The apartment was approximately 82 m², with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom. The actual capture took approximately 15 minutes.

Nothing was staged as a special demonstration. We simply wanted to see what the workflow would be like in a real apartment.

Here is what happened.

Why Capture an Apartment During a Normal Viewing?

The idea was not to produce a polished marketing video.

It was much simpler: capture the apartment once and have a way to look at it again later.

When comparing several properties, the problem isn't usually a lack of information. There is often too much of it.

After walking through three or four apartments, it becomes surprisingly difficult to remember small details. You may have a dozen photos of each property, but still wonder how the kitchen connects to the living room or whether there was enough space beside the sofa.

That was the part we wanted to test.

Could a spatial capture make it easier to go back and check those details after leaving?

A Few Minutes of Preparation

Before we started, we spent a few minutes getting the apartment ready.

It wasn't a complicated setup, but these small things made the capture easier.

Open the doors

We opened the interior doors and cabinet doors before starting.

That made the route through the apartment more straightforward and meant we didn't have to stop repeatedly to open things while scanning.

It also gave the system a more consistent view of the spaces as we moved from one room to another.

Clean the lenses

We cleaned the panoramic camera and scanning sensor before starting.

This is easy to overlook when you're in a hurry, but fingerprints or dust on a lens can become much more obvious once the images are processed.

Decide on a route

The apartment had a fairly simple layout, so we planned the route before pressing record.

We started around the living area, moved through the bedrooms, then covered the kitchen and bathroom before returning toward the starting area.

Inside the larger rooms, we used gentle S-shaped movements instead of simply walking in a straight line.

The route didn't need to be complicated. We mainly wanted to keep the movement continuous and give the system enough overlapping information as we moved around the apartment.

Starting the Capture

We started the capture at around 14:51.

The setup itself was straightforward, although there was one detail worth paying attention to: the panoramic camera and the spatial capture system need to be started in the correct sequence.

We placed the equipment in a stable position with enough open space around it, started the panoramic camera first, and then began the capture workflow in the SLAM GO app.

After the system completed its initialization, we started walking.

From there, it felt much more like walking through an apartment than operating a piece of surveying equipment.

The main thing was simply to keep moving at a steady pace and follow the route we had planned.

Walking Through the Apartment

Handheld spatial capture is quite different from traditional tripod-based scanning.

You're not standing in one position waiting for the equipment to finish. You're moving through the property while the system continuously tracks where you are.

That means the person holding the camera becomes part of the workflow.

We tried to keep a comfortable walking speed and avoided sudden movements. The narrow hallway and doorways needed a little more attention, so we slowed down in those areas rather than trying to rush through them.

One thing became clear fairly quickly:

Finishing faster isn't necessarily the goal. A clean and continuous trajectory is more useful.

We also tried not to stay too close to walls or large objects and kept a reasonable distance from the surrounding surfaces whenever the room allowed it.

Eventually, the route brought us back toward where we started.

That closed loop was useful because it gave us a natural way to check the consistency of the capture rather than simply stopping somewhere at the end of the apartment.

About 15 Minutes for the Whole Apartment

The complete capture took approximately 15 minutes.

During that time, we walked through the living room, both bedrooms, the kitchen and the bathroom while following the planned route.

For a small residential property, 15 minutes is short enough to fit into a normal viewing or documentation visit without turning the whole appointment into a scanning session.

That was probably the most interesting part of the test.

We didn't have to treat the apartment as a special scanning site.

There was no tripod setup in every room, no long pause between spaces, and no need to ask everyone to wait around while the equipment collected data.

We simply walked through the apartment once.

What Happens After You Leave?

This is where the capture became more interesting to us.

Once the viewing was over, we no longer had to rely entirely on what we remembered.

The captured space could be reviewed again, which made it possible to look at things that seemed unimportant during the first visit.

For someone comparing rental or purchase options, that might mean checking:

• how the living room connects to the kitchen
• how much usable space there is around the furniture
• the layout of each bedroom
• cabinet and storage areas
• the way you move between rooms
• whether a particular desk, sofa or other piece of furniture might fit

These aren't necessarily things you would think to measure during a first viewing.

But once you're back at the office or at home, they can suddenly become important.

For a real estate professional, the same type of capture could also provide another way to help a client revisit a property without immediately arranging another physical visit.

It doesn't replace photographs or video.

It simply gives the property another dimension that conventional media doesn't always provide.

One Capture, Different Ways to Review the Space

Another thing we wanted to explore was what could be produced from the same capture session.

The captured data can be processed into a point-cloud-based representation of the apartment, while the panoramic imagery provides a more familiar visual way to look around the space.

The workflow can also be used to generate a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation, offering another way to present the captured environment.

So the site visit doesn't necessarily end with one type of file.

The same capture can become the starting point for several different ways of reviewing or presenting the property.

That makes the original 15 minutes a little more useful than it might first appear.

What We Learned

This was a small apartment with a relatively straightforward layout.

It wasn't a large commercial property, a construction site or a difficult industrial environment.

And that's exactly why we think the test was worth doing.

The interesting question wasn't whether a spatial camera could capture an apartment. We already knew it could.

The more practical question was whether the process could fit naturally into something as ordinary as an apartment viewing.

For this particular test, the workflow was quite simple:

prepare the space → plan the route → capture the apartment → process the data → review it later

The biggest difference from ordinary photos isn't necessarily that you collect "more information."

It's that you can come back to the space in a different way.

A photograph gives you a view of a room.

A spatial capture gives you more of the room's context.

And Then We Started Asking More Questions

The 15-minute capture was only the first part of the experiment.

The more interesting part came afterwards, when we started looking at the actual results.

How useful is the point cloud?

How does the panoramic view look?

What does the 3D Gaussian Splatting output look like from this particular apartment?

And, perhaps most importantly, does any of it actually help when you're trying to decide whether a property works for you?

For our colleague, the questions became very practical.

Will his desk fit in the bedroom?

Is there enough room for his 34-inch ultrawide monitor?

And which apartment actually has the more usable kitchen?

Those are the kinds of questions that are difficult to answer from memory alone.

We'll look at the actual capture results in Vol. 2, including the point cloud, panoramic imagery and 3D Gaussian Splatting output from this apartment.

The capture took about 15 minutes.

Now we're more interested in what those 15 minutes gave us.

The capture happens once. The space can be revisited many times.