This iPad attachment will make remodeling your house way easier

A startup that makes a special sensor that integrates with Apple iPads wants to make home improvement easier for people who are more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard than with a tape measure.

Canvas, a free new app from Occipital, lets iPad users capture a scale model of any room. Once users have scanned a room, they can go back and pull any measurement from it - like how wide a window is, or exactly how tall the ceilings are. 

It's pretty easy. I saw Occipital CEO Jeff Powers accurately scan a lounge at Business Insider headquarters in 30 seconds. 

Canvas requires Occipital's Structure Sensor, though, and a wide-angle lens attachment. The Structure Sensor plugs into your iPad's Lightning port, and attaches to it with a customized bracket. Inside its aluminum hull is a 3D sensor which can accurately determine the distance of objects.

Combined with some pretty complicated math, it means an app can accurately tell that your ceiling is, say, 14 feet high nearly instantaneously. It can produce detailed models that actually look like your rooms. 

Although the Canvas app is free, the Structure Sensor costs $379, and the required wide-angle lens costs $20. And if you want to export the Canvas model into an CAD file, for further manipulation, it costs $29 per model. 

Powers says the main target market for Canvas is professional interior designers and contractors, but he suspects some do-it-yourselfers will find it useful, too.

Here's a screenshot of the scanning process on an iPad:

Take a closer look at how Canvas works: