XGRIDS, the company behind the Lixel and PortalCam professional 3D scanners, has brought its reality capture technology to the smartphone with LCC Scan. The free app lets you capture a person, pet, object or place as an interactive, photorealistic 3D scene using nothing more than your phone.

As XGRIDS puts it, a photo preserves a frame and a video preserves a sequence, while LCC Scan is designed to preserve the whole scene in a way you can move around afterwards.

On-device capture in minutes

Capturing is straightforward. You simply walk around the subject for about a minute, and the app reconstructs it locally on the device. There is no specialist scanning hardware, no photogrammetry knowledge required and, importantly for privacy, no cloud upload.

There are three capture modes: Portrait for people and outfits, Object for figures, collectables and handmade pieces, and Free for anything else. Processing can be done in Fast or High Quality modes. In XGRIDS’ own testing on an iPhone 17 Pro, a full scan took 1 minute 37 seconds to process in Fast mode and 2 minutes 19 seconds in High Quality, though times will vary by device.

Once captured, scans can be turned into one-tap 3D orbit videos, shared as interactive 3D links or posted to XGRIDS’ PortalPark community. They can also be exported as PLY or LCC2 files for use in other 3D software. Pets will need to stay still during capture, which may be the trickiest part of the whole process.

XGRIDS suggests uses such as capturing a childhood bedroom before moving out, a grandparent’s living room, a sculpture or a handmade gift before it is given away.

Our take

3D Gaussian splatting has moved quickly from research labs to professional tools, and seeing it arrive as a free, on-device phone app is a big step. For photographers it opens up a new way to record places and objects, and the PLY export means scans are not locked into XGRIDS’ own ecosystem.

XGRIDS LCC Scan key features

XGRIDS LCC Scan price and availability

XGRIDS LCC Scan is available now as a free download from the App Store and Google Play.