Unless you want to move all the furniture out of place (even in-built one), all the heavy stuff blocking edges and corners from view etc. Good luck with that bathroom sink or kitchen counter-top.
And angles and inequalities (eg. top edge vs bottom edge), that gets funny fast.
There are companies today like Matterport: https://matterport.com/ which leverage LiDAR to do high detail measurements and mapping for various applications.
My company uses them to measure prior to use creating build plans for remodels and I used them at my previous company to do high detail measurements in the context of real estate to make 3D tours of homes.
If the iPhone can eventually get to the point where Matterport is today with their tech then that's good enough for a huge number of use cases.
Pretty much everyone in the construction and remodeling industry right now is prepping for that as the future. We all know it's 3 to 5 years away and want to be the first one to get it right.
Everyone is prepping for those self driving cars for the last 10 years, yet we are still swinging those steering wheels ourselves :)
There are certainly cases where LiDAR approach can work wonders. But as long as you need to do a couple of corrections manually, you'll need to have both set of tools at your disposal.
It will definitely augment current measuring approach (or rather, existing tools will be used to augment results coming from 3D scanning), but as soon as you have to pull out a laser or tape for one edge, your workflow is significantly more complex.
Not to mention that for cases where one might use SH3D, it'd be hard to tell an automated tool to ignore that 2"x2" "tooth" in one corner for just wanting to look at different furniture arrangement.
isn't that all of the more reason to use a high-resolution 3d LIDAR point cloud - to get the exactly geometry? I hear your point about moving furniture, but you kind of need to do that anyway to get a measuring tape into corners.
But then you need to measure "free standing" wall (when measuring the opening is not an option), and without someone to hold something flat at the other end for the laser to bounce off, measuring tape still wins.
Which is not to say that laser is not extremely useful: I generally use both.
TBF that would be a good application of AI to infer what is clutter and what is not from the visual light image of the same space, the wall behind an object can simply be inferred from the sections of that wall that aren't occluded by the clutter. It might not catch some obscure cases where clutter obscures some anomalous part of the wall, but it'll be good enough in the other 99% of cases. Multiple viewpoints would probably deal with a large number of oddities too - much how photometry can get more accurate with more viewpoints already.
Unless you want to move all the furniture out of place (even in-built one), all the heavy stuff blocking edges and corners from view etc. Good luck with that bathroom sink or kitchen counter-top.
And angles and inequalities (eg. top edge vs bottom edge), that gets funny fast.