- Report
- FR-013
- Published
- Written by
- Saga Lindqvist
- Reading time
- 02 min / 381 words
What 400 million points cannot tell you
A dense scan records geometry with great precision and says almost nothing about material, cause or change. This is how we fill the gaps.
Section 01
The comfort of density
Our largest survey this year produced 412 million points, registered to within two millimetres across a building of nine thousand square metres. Clients find a dataset like that reassuring, and they are right to. Nothing else records a building as completely or as quickly. But density is easily mistaken for knowledge. A point cloud is a record of surfaces, frozen at the moment of capture. It says where a surface was and how it reflected light. It does not say what the surface is made of, why it sits where it does, or what it will be doing next winter.
Section 02
Three blind spots
In practice the gaps fall into three groups. The first is material: a scan cannot tell a load-bearing wall from a lining, or sound timber from wet timber with the same profile. The second is cause: it shows that a slab has deflected eleven millimetres, not whether that is creep, overload or a support that has settled. The third is time: a single capture cannot separate a movement that has stopped from one that is still under way. Across our last forty projects, scans alone found 41 percent of the defects we later confirmed.
Fig. 013.1/ Defects found by method
Unit / %
- Scan only41%
- Scan and sensors73%
- Scan, sensors and site visit96%
Section 03
Pairing points with people
So every scan we deliver comes with two things it cannot produce itself. A surveyor walks the building with the cloud open on a tablet and records what each anomaly actually is, by tapping, coring and asking the people who use it. Sensors are then placed where the anomalies are, so that the next question, whether it is getting worse, is answered by data rather than by a second scan. Together the three methods found 96 percent. The points are still the foundation. They are simply not the whole answer.
Section 04
Where the next points go
None of this argues for fewer points. Scan density keeps rising, and every step catches more geometry earlier. What we have changed is where the effort goes. The survey budget on a typical project is now split roughly in three: capture, verification on site and the first season of sensors. The share of defects found by scanning alone has crept up from 38 to 44 percent as density improved, while the combined method has stayed above ninety. The cloud is getting better. It is simply not getting better at the questions it was never able to answer.
Fig. 013.2/ Defects found by year
Unit / %
| Period | Combined method | Scan only |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 88% | 38% |
| 2023 | 91% | 40% |
| 2024 | 94% | 41% |
| 2025 | 96% | 43% |
| 2026 | 96% | 44% |
