Show HN: Stray Scanner – collect raw Lidar scans on iOS devices (opens in new tab)

Hey everyone! Here is an app I've been working on over the past couple years for my own purposes. The original idea came from me wanting to collect RGB-D scans for research and development purposes. One option being to buy a depth camera and use that, but I figured I might as well just use the time-of-flight sensor on my phone.

The app has been on the App Store for a while and I originally wrote about it here https://keke.dev/blog/2021/03/10/Stray-Scanner.html. The app can be downloaded here for free https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stray-scanner/id1557051662.

Over the years, tons of users from all over the world have reached out to me asking for the source code, feature requests or adapting it in some way. The users are usually computer vision researchers at universities or corporate research labs or they are engineers working on commercial projects.

Sometimes the requested changes don't make sense for other users. Sometimes they do, but I don't have the time to develop them.

I've just now decided to just release the source code so that people can hack it to do whatever they want with it. Hopefully people will find it useful and that some people might contribute changes back to the app and it becomes more useful for others as well.