How a scan actually gets made.
No LIDAR. No drone. No agency rep with a clipboard. One person, one phone, two soft lights, ninety minutes, a quiet pipeline. Here is the whole thing, end to end.
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01 DAY 0 · 5 min
You text us.
You send the address, the property type, and one or two notes about the space — bedrooms, square footage, anything tricky like glass walls, a dark room, a backyard you want included. We reply with a quote and two scan windows that fit your week. Most replies are same-day. We confirm a sixty-minute arrival window the night before.
Form lives at /scan/book. Texts and emails work too.
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02 DAY OF · 30 min
Setup, before we touch the camera.
We arrive thirty minutes early. We open blinds, switch off ceiling fans, kill any bouncing TV reflections, and place two soft continuous lights to fill the dim corners. We don't move heavy furniture, never touch electrical, and shoes-off is the default. You don't have to be there — many hosts hand off a key code and get a finished tour back the next day.
We carry $1M general liability. Certificate of insurance available on request.
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03 CAPTURE · 60–90 min
A slow walk, every angle.
The camera is a current-generation phone on a stabilizer. We walk the space at a measured pace — corner to corner, doorways, looking up at ceilings, down at floors, into mirrors. About forty minutes of footage covers a 1-bedroom. Larger and commercial spaces take two passes. No flashes, no markers on walls, no holes drilled.
Output of capture: roughly 4-12GB of raw video and frames per scan.
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04 PROCESS · 8–18 hr
The scene gets reconstructed.
Frames go through a Gaussian Splat trainer running on a GPU box overnight. Each pixel of the original walk becomes a tiny oriented ellipsoid in 3D space — millions of them, layered to recreate every shadow, scratch, and good thing about the room. The output is a single .compressed.ply file under 12MB for a typical 1BR. It loads on a five-year-old phone.
No agency markup, no third-party photogrammetry vendor. Pipeline runs on our hardware.
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05 DELIVER · 24 hr from capture
A link, a file, a screenshot kit.
You get an email with three things. A single shareable link (paste in Airbnb, Resy, your bio, a text). The raw .splat file you own forever, even if you stop hosting with us. And a folder of high-resolution still frames pulled from inside the scan — useful as cover photos if you'd rather not redo your listing photography.
Re-scans within 7 days are free if anything looks broken. Otherwise, half-price re-scan within 12 months.
We tested three pipelines and shipped the one that survives a real shoot.
Matterport-style LIDAR rigs cost five thousand dollars, take six hours to set up, and produce dollhouse meshes that look hand-modeled. Photogrammetry from DSLRs gives a clean mesh but loses every shiny surface — glass, chrome, polished concrete. Gaussian Splats, trained from a phone walk, keep the soft falloff of real lighting and survive the surfaces other methods drop. We picked the one we'd actually use as a guest.
| PLUME | LIDAR RIG | DSLR PHOTO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-site time | 90 min | 4-6 hr | 2-3 hr |
| Glass & mirrors | Captured | Holes | Reflections only |
| Soft light & mood | Preserved | Flattened | Frozen frame |
| Guest needs an app | No | Web viewer | No (it's photos) |
| Output | Walkable scene | Dollhouse mesh | Image gallery |
| Starting price | $250 | $800-1,500 | $300-600 |
Prices reflect Dallas-area median rates from operator quotes collected May 2026.