About Open Survey

Land surveying hardware has been radically democratized. A decade ago, centimeter-grade RTK GNSS meant a five-figure vendor kit; today survey-grade receivers start under $1,000, and free public correction networks cover much of the United States. The software those receivers depend on has not kept pace: it's either vendor-locked and subscription-gated, or open-source but built around desktop GIS workflows rather than a surveyor's daily loop.

Open Survey is our answer: a genuinely open-source, survey-first platform. A native SwiftUI app for iPhone and iPad that works instantly with the phone's built-in GPS and scales to any Bluetooth NMEA RTK receiver. A browser-based workspace that's useful in sixty seconds with no account. Self-hosting for teams that want their data on their own servers. And a signature capability no one else offers: LiDAR scans and Gaussian splats as georeferenced field assets, pinned to survey-grade coordinates on the map.

Who's building it

Laan Labs is a small independent studio with 70M+ app downloads, best known for 3D Scanner App and deep experience in Metal rendering, ARKit/LiDAR capture, and computer vision. Open Survey is the third project in a family that shares one pattern: take a category where incumbents charge subscriptions for table stakes, and ship the table stakes free and open with genuinely excellent native engineering.

• OpenShape3D — open-source mobile CAD for iPad and iPhone.
• OpenPlan3D — browser-first floor plans with a LiDAR capture companion.
• Open Survey — land surveying, from phone GPS to centimeter RTK, field to browser.

Our principles

• Survey-first. The receiver–stakeout–deliverable loop is the product, not a form builder or a GIS viewer.
• Receiver-agnostic. If it outputs NMEA, it should work. No hardware lock-in, ever.
• Free where others charge. Linework, code libraries, COGO, site calibration, reports — free and open source.
• Honest accuracy. Every observation carries its fix type, RMS, DOP, correction age, and datum/epoch. We sell measurement transparency, not shortcuts.
• Your data is yours. Local-first storage, real exports in open formats, and a self-hostable backend.

Where things stand

Open Survey is in active development. The plan: a public web demo and open repositories first, then a TestFlight beta of the field app, then the synced web workspace and self-host release. While we build, we're publishing practical articles on RTK GNSS, geodesy, and modern field workflows — the same research that's shaping the product.