Service
3D Laser Scanning
Location
Toronto
Industry
Facility Management
The Problem
A downtown Toronto hotel was planning a refurbishment of a guest floor. Before the design could be finalised, the team needed to know where the electrical outlets actually were: how many, at what height, on which walls, and in what relationship to the existing furniture layout.
That sounds like a small question. On a hotel floor it is not.
A guest floor is a repeating layout that stops repeating the moment you check it. Rooms get altered individually over decades of service. Outlets get added for a television that was replaced twice since, or moved during a previous refurbishment that never made it back onto a drawing. The original electrical drawings, where they exist at all, describe the building as it was handed over, not as it has been maintained.
The practical constraint was time. A hotel floor is revenue-generating space. Every room the survey team occupies is a room that cannot be sold that night, so the capture had to move quickly and without disruption to the rooms either side.
Why Mobile Scanning Rather Than Terrestrial
Most of our commercial work uses terrestrial scanners on tripods, which stay in one position for each setup. That method suits spaces where precision matters more than pace.
This project inverted that balance. The deliverable did not require the tightest geometry we can produce. It required complete, reliable coverage of a large number of small repeating rooms, captured fast, with the operator moving continuously rather than setting up and tearing down in every bathroom and entry corridor.
Handheld mobile scanning suited that. The operator walks the space and the unit builds the point cloud continuously as it moves. On a floor made up of dozens of small rooms connected by a corridor, the time saved not repositioning a tripod is the entire difference between a one visit job and a multi day one.
The trade is real and worth stating: mobile units trade precision for coverage speed. Manufacturers publish looser figures for handheld SLAM hardware than for terrestrial scanners. For recording where outlets sit on a wall so a designer can plan around them, that trade is the right way round. For structural interfaces or fabrication tolerances, we would have used the tripod.
How the Capture Ran
The operator walked each room in a continuous loop: entry, bathroom, main room, window wall, back out to the corridor. The corridor was captured as a spine tying the rooms together so the whole floor registered as one dataset rather than a set of disconnected rooms.
Nothing was moved, opened, or switched off. Capture is non-contact, so furniture, fittings and finishes stayed exactly as they were. Rooms were entered, walked, and released.
Coverage was checked on site before demobilising. On a repeating floor plate it is easy to assume a room was captured because the one next to it was, and a gap discovered back at the office means returning to an operating hotel and rebooking access. Checking while still on the floor is considerably cheaper than the alternative.
What Was Delivered
The registered point cloud was the primary deliverable, with outlet positions readable directly from it. From that, measured plans recorded the outlet locations per room type, drafted by a technician working from the captured data.
The value of the point cloud, on this project in particular, was that it answered questions nobody had asked yet. The brief was outlets. But a point cloud of a guest floor also records ceiling heights, window reveals, bathroom door swings, radiator positions, and every dimension a refurbishment designer eventually needs. When the design moved on from electrical to furniture and fixtures, the team had the data already rather than booking a second visit into occupied rooms.
What This Project Illustrates
Match the capture method to the deliverable, not to what sounds most impressive. Mobile scanning was the correct choice here because the question was positional rather than dimensional. A different brief on the same floor would have justified a different method.
Occupied buildings are a scheduling problem before they are a technical one. The scanning was straightforward. Arranging access to rooms in a working hotel, and doing it without taking more of them out of service than necessary, was the part that shaped the plan.
Repeating layouts do not repeat. Any floor that has been in service for years has drifted from its drawings, room by room, in ways nobody recorded. That drift is precisely what a scan is for.
Related Services
- 3D Laser Scanning: terrestrial and mobile capture for commercial interiors
- As-Built Drawings: measured 2D drawings produced from scan data
- 3D Virtual Tours: hosted walkthroughs for remote review of a space
If you have a hotel, multi-unit residential, or repeating commercial floor plate that needs recording before a refurbishment, send the floor area, the room count, and your access constraints. Request a quote and we will confirm which capture method fits the deliverable.