Map your home in AR

Create the perfect home or office without any fuss in Magicplan

Arthur C Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke probably wasn’t thinking about home planning apps, but Magicplan is indeed magical: instead of faffing around with measuring tape for hours, you can accurately measure an entire building with nothing more than your iPad’s camera. Once you’ve done that, you can then add architectural features, experiment with different items of furniture and their location, and even work out the total cost of painting, tiling and other key tasks.

The app is great for home improvements, for tradespeople to price jobs, for estate agents, for garden design and even for Airbnb hosts who can supplement their carefully chosen photos with a proper floor plan.

Magicplan is free to download, and the developer is unusually generous: you can use the majority of the features without having to pay anything, and it’s only really the more serious pro-level stuff such as highlighting electrical wiring that requires upgrading to the paid-for version. You can’t export your plan from the free version, but a one-use unlock to enable this is pretty cheap – £2.99 – and even the subscription packages, which offer all kinds of export options and multi-user support, are very reasonably priced. The app is just as happy measuring an entire block of apartments as it is a simple studio flat.

You ain’t seen nothing yet

What makes Magicplan special is its use of augmented reality, which combines computer imaging and real-time camera footage. To capture your room all you need to do is point the camera at its corners. The layout and measuring is done automatically, and if it isn’t quite right, it’s really easy to edit.

Apple thinks augmented reality (AR) is going to be a really big deal, and we agree. Magicplan uses the ARKit framework in iOS 11 to deliver more accurate measurements without the need to stay still, and other apps from the likes of IKEA use the technology to show what specific items of furniture will look like in your home, as well as fun stuff such as virtual games on your coffee table.

If measuring with Magicplan feels very much like living in the future, that’s because it is. Given what AR can do today, just imagine what it’ll be able to do in a few years’ time!

Magicplan is as happy measuring an entire block of apartments as it is a simple studio flat