Four floor plan input types and their output accuracy

Floor plan input is any relevant form of visual media redrawers used to produce floor plan images used in property listings. Apart from hand sketches made by photographers on site, there are multiple other types. Each one of them yields output at a different accuracy level. In this blog, we feature the 5 most common floor plan input types including MatterPort Floor Plan, and Cubicasa Floor Plan, and rank them on their corresponding output’s accuracy.

Architectural drawings or technical drawings.

Technical floor drawings (house plan blueprint) of the property show a comprehensive level of details and relationship between rooms and spaces. They are actually used for housing construction where builders follow the drawing. Such drawings can be provided by the property owners, constructors, or architectures. Another type of this drawing is output from other software such as AutoCAD, and Visio Microsoft Office.

This floor plan input type provides the highest level of accuracy thanks to the level of details, measures, and technical aspects demonstrated. When it comes to production, there’s no extra work for photographers on the field. However, they are not easy to obtain unless it’s a newly or recently constructed house or project. If it’s a property that has been around for a long time and owned by many cycles of homeowners, getting the technical drawings is almost impossible. 

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Photographer’s sketch

Photographers are usually requested by their clients to provide a floor plan. That’s why some of them have really mastered the art of hand sketching the property layout with tools such as laser rulers.

This kind of floor plan input is perhaps easier to obtain, create and understand than the architectural drawing. However, it requires accurate measurement and drawing knowledge from photographers. For photography companies, standard training is needed for photographers to use measurement tools and show the spacial relationship effectively.

The floor plan created from this input type provides a matching accuracy level since it purely reflects the sketch. In plain English, correct input gives correct output. Mis-measured input gives misinforming output.

MatterPort-generated sketch – MatterPort Floor Plan

Floor plans can also be created by MatterPort Virtual Tour. This has become a popular method adopted by many photography companies to sell floor plans and virtual tours together. From the tour generated, production staff will use the top view and manually recreate the sketch as input for floor plan redraw.

This input type is obtainable with most MatterPort products, including Smartphone App. Plus. It doesn’t need photographers to measure the space to produce a sketch. However, this doesn’t go without problems. As MatterPort light-dar doesn’t scan the under-surface space, not all rooms’ and walls’ info is registered. Thus, the sketch is prone to inaccuracy and so is the final MatterPort floor plan. It’s also worth mentioning that outdoor and exterior spaces are not often featured in the tour, the site plan part of the property is a no-show on the floor.

Shortly, due to the manual process from reading the tour to creating a hand sketch, the accuracy of the floor plan generated from MatterPort is not as high as the previous two types.

Cubicasa input – Cubicasa Floor Plan

Generating a floor plan with CubiCasa is indeed a common practice now. Like filming walkthrough videos, photographers move around the property and record the space with the Cubicacsa app. This app allows users to use voice-over to label the rooms. The recorded materials will then be used to generate a top view, followed by the floor plan creation process.

This process takes less effort from photographers since the app’s light-dar itself does all the measurement work. Also, it outperforms Matterport in terms of processing time because there’s no need to generate a tour in between. Still, Cubicasa’s accuracy is agreed to be less than MatterPort’s.

Since Cubicasa’s Lightdar can only record a certain proportion of the floor (60% as widely agreed by photographers), the production staff has to decide the structure of the house and create the floor. As a result, the sketch’s accuracy suffers, and the final Cubicasa floor plan reflects accordingly. So is Cubi Casa Floor Plan measurement accurate? The common answer is no.

Photo and Video

Surprisingly, you can create a floor plan from videos and photos of the property. In this method, you need to provide editors or production staff with photos, videos, and ideally, a description of the property’s spatial relationship and dimension estimation. From there, production staff will work on creating a sketch input for the floor plan redraw process.

As you can tell, floor plans made from photos and videos require absolutely no drawing effort, no tools, no stuff. Simple photos and videos of the property will work. For that reason, it’s the cheapest option to produce a floor plan. 

Accuracy depends on the estimation of the floor plan creator (or editor), which is subjective. And it goes without saying, floor plans created from this input type are acceptably the least accurate. 

Conclusion

To put it short, floor plans are created from input from multiple sources perhaps the least expected are photos and videos while the most common is traditional hand sketches. Selecting what input to produce and provide depends on the accuracy level requirement.