Comment by boilerupnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boilerupnc | Hacker News Reader

While the discussion has been on wiring and ethernet, I would argue making a digital twin scan for a new home construction before dry-wall goes up is one of the best small money investments I made for the ongoing upkeep of my home. No argument on all smart future proofing ideas for new construction (redundant wire drops, chase pull-wire pipes in 2-3 parts of the house, pre-wiring roof soffets for cameras, etc ...), but it has been priceless to be able to show service folks for big and small jobs ... an X-RAY of my home's studs, wiring and plumbing. I've been able to avert mistakes (protective plate for gas line sitting behind here), plan with the right assumptions (didn't realize there was a horizontal support board between those studs) and visualize possible remodel options (that exhaust duct could easily be re-routed to go out this wall instead). While digital twin scans are more and more common in commercial facility locations to document equipment for repair and insurance purposes - it's amazing to me that this still has not caught on with residential builders as a nice upsell option for trivial effort/cost. The digital twin should live with the deed and be handed over when the house changes owners. Every friend and service person I've shown it to - has commented - "wish I had that for my house".

Along with the other commenters, I'd be interested to know what you used. When I built my home, I took hundreds of photos of all wall and ceiling surfaces. I then later annotated those photo file names to the right places on the blueprint/schematics. Now I look up the photo file name from the schematic and pull up the right photo.

I would love to be able to just "walk through" and look around in 3D my house before the insulation & drywall went up. I wouldn't want to pay for those 3D house tours that realtors are using now if I built another house and wanted to do something similar.

For my house, I bought one of those 360 cameras, Rico Theta something, it is about 3 years old, and took pics through out the remodel. There is free software to set those up like a 3D house tour, although not as flashy. I did that a few different points in time, but having the pics annotated to be searchable by room name or "wiring" or "duct" is more helpful.

The 360 camera was hugely helpful because I could take one picture of a room instead of 5-15. I could walk through 3K square feet and take pics of everything in about 15 minutes.

I tried to do the same thing using the free matterport app for iOS, but it failed terribly at stitching everything together before the drywall was up. I think it got confused by all the wide open spaces and lack of walls.

Ended up just taking a video as I walked throughout every room of the house which has generally proven to be helpful a number of times. In retrospect I probably should have looked into picking up a 360 degree camera.

I would love to hear more about how you did this digital twin scan. Agree it should live with the deed along with a survey, makes life easier for everyone. Planting trees whose shade you may not sit in.

(scholar of building sciences)

We did an analog tech version of that with a VHS camcorder on my parents’ house.

The only time we had to use it, we had both an inside and outside view that just missed the one key place we were about to work on. :)

It was good enough to still be helpful (we were able to guess based on the likely path of the NM-B (“Romex”) in the spots we could see), but it was amusing how we missed the key spot by inches twice.

Please say more about what service you bought and what data product you got. I would be interested in doing the same.

Replying to all 3 comments ... I considered a couple of options.

Option 1: I chose this path. I used this company [0] for convenience. They were easy to get a quick quote and found a person local to my area (I'm located in the mid-Atlantic) to do the scan. For < 4000 sqf homes - it takes about 3 - 3.5 hours to fully scan. Cost is dependent on size of area scanned and was in the 3 digit range. Post-pandemic, I suspect with a bit of hunting on gig websites, you can probably find local 3-d scanners who usually are hired by realtors for home-sale scans - but are equally willing to do other scan jobs as well. Many of them use Matterport equipment and from my small anecdote sample - scanning was a hobby which then got turbocharged into fun gig work by the realty virtual tour boom during the pandemic. They own the equipment ... and do scans for some side money.

Option 2: Buy the scanner camera equipment and DIY.[1]

At the end, I received a matterport model that was transferred to my free hosted account - limited to 1 model. While I have no need for more than 1, I did want to archive a backup of my model locally for safe-keeping. This project pointed me in the right direction [2]

Closing thoughts. I love being able to travel back in time through a 3-d render of my home when it was still just the skeleton. There needs to be better ways to achieve archiving of the model - given its value in terms of cost to acquire and security. While I didn't appreciate it at the time, using the model for quick virtual measurements of areas within rooms has also been handy when looking at furniture and rugs. If I forgot to measure before going, I can pull it up on my laptop and get a quick ballpark measure within the house. I'm thinking of doing another scan after I'm fully settled in ... to easily capture and annotate my stuff for insurance purposes.

[0] https://virtualspace.global/

[1] https://matterport.com/

[2] https://github.com/rebane2001/matterport-dl

Thank you so much for writing this up!

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