Hey all, this is the first time I'm really sharing this.

I've been obsessed with one problem: how do you prove a tree someone planted/recorded is still there? A geotagged photo can't tell you which tree it is or exactly where it is, and survey gear is way too expensive for most people actually growing trees.

So I've been trying to do it with a regular phone. Here's a walk through my yard on a Google Pixel. It locks onto each tree via dot cloud and build a 3d digital twin of its environment. It's a cool engineering problem to work with the error of consumer GPS and the lack of depth sensors like liDAR but it's working better and better.

It should work even better on newer iPhones with LiDAR, but I want this to work on low-budget phones, even offline, in places like rural Indigenous communities.

It's still early and it's only my yard, but I really want to solve this. Is anyone working on something similar? Or know who this might be useful for? I'd love to connect.