Scan, Don't Guess: Inside Cargo Measure, the LIDAR App We're Building to Map Road Cases

Every load-out starts the same way. Someone holds a tape measure against a road case, someone else writes a number on a piece of gaff tape, and a third person (usually the production manager) types those numbers into a spreadsheet that may or may not still exist by the next tour. Multiply that by three hundred cases, a couple of dozen carts, and a handful of oddball pieces that didn't come from a flight case shop, and you've spent the better part of a day building a dataset that's already starting to drift the moment you finish it.

That workflow is about to look very strange. Phones in your crew's pockets already carry sensors capable of measuring those same cases to within a centimeter, and the gap between what the hardware can do and what working productions are actually using has been closing fast. At Backline Logic, we've been quietly building something to close that gap on purpose: a LIDAR-based measurement app called Cargo Measure that talks directly to Truck Packer. It isn't released yet, but it's far enough along that it's worth pulling the curtain back on what we're building and why.

The data problem nobody wants to admit they have

If you run inventory in this industry, you already know the dirty secret of load planning: the dimensions in your rental software are often a polite fiction. Cases get rebuilt. Foam gets recut. A 'standard' anvil case from one shop is 4 inches deeper than a 'standard' anvil case from the shop down the street. Sub-rented gear from Clair, PRG, 4Wall, or Solotech arrives with whatever dimensions the partner shop happens to have on file, and those numbers are rarely the same as what's actually rolling off the truck.

The result is a load plan that looks airtight on paper and then turns into improv jazz on the dock. Casters don't line up to the stripes on the trailer floor. The pre-rig truss truck has eight inches of unaccounted-for empty space along one wall. The dimmer beach takes one more spot in the trailer than the spreadsheet promised, which means something else gets bumped, which means a phone call to dispatch, which means a stagehand standing around on the clock. Every one of those failures traces back to the same root cause: the dimensions in the system didn't match the dimensions in the warehouse.

The fix isn't more discipline. It's better measurement, and ideally a kind of measurement that happens passively, the moment a new case enters the building.

Why phone LIDAR finally got good enough

LIDAR sensors have been showing up on iPhones and iPads since 2020, but for the first few years they were genuinely a novelty. The depth maps were noisy, the range was short, and the apps available to consumers felt closer to a tech demo than a tool you'd use to bid a tour. That isn't true anymore. Recent independent testing puts iPhone LIDAR at roughly ±1 cm accuracy on objects larger than 10 cm on a side, with reliable distance readings out to about 10 meters and a depth-map resolution of around 256×192 pixels (roughly 49,000 depth samples per frame). For our purposes (measuring road cases, carts, racks, and odd-shaped flightcased gear), that is comfortably within tolerance.

A peer-reviewed evaluation of the iPad Pro's onboard LIDAR for 3D indoor mapping showed point-cloud spacing under a millimeter in static captures, with the average distance between points climbing to about a centimeter once the device was moved around. Translated out of academic language: if you hold the phone still for a second over a case, you'll get a measurement that's better than your tape measure. If you wave the phone around, you'll still get a measurement that's good enough for load planning.

Two other things changed alongside the hardware. Apple's RoomPlan and ARKit object-capture frameworks matured to the point where third-party developers can ask the system for clean bounding boxes and oriented dimensions rather than raw point clouds. And the cohort of devices in working productions is finally tilted toward LIDAR-equipped Pro models. The iPhone 15 Pro, 16 Pro, and now 17 Pro, plus the M4 iPad Pro all carry the sensor. The probability that any given truck loader already has the right hardware in their pocket is, today, approaching one.

What Cargo Measure does

Cargo Measure is, in its simplest description, a scanner with one job: turn the physical cases in your warehouse into accurate, properly named records that can flow downstream into a load plan. The intended workflow on the dock is meant to look almost too simple.

• Point the phone at a case. The app finds the case, locks an oriented bounding box around it, and gives you length, width, and height to the nearest centimeter.
• Confirm or edit the auto-generated name. You can tag it ('FOH desk,' 'sub L1,' 'pre-rig stack 3') and assign it to a category you've already set up: workboxes, road cases, racks, carts, custom.
• Tap save. The case syncs to your Truck Packer account as a new case template, ready to drag into any pack plan.

Underneath, we're doing some less-simple things: filtering out the floor and the wall and the forklift that wandered into frame, snapping the bounding box to a stable orientation so two scans of the same case from different angles produce the same numbers, and reconciling against cases you already have on file so a re-scan updates the existing record instead of creating a duplicate.

We're also planning a batch mode for warehouse intake days. Walk a row, hold the phone steady at each case for a second or two, and end the session with thirty new cases ready to import. That's the kind of thing that takes a half day with a tape measure and a clipboard, compressed into the time it takes to grab a coffee.

The piece nobody else is solving

There are plenty of general-purpose LIDAR scanning apps in the App Store. A few of them are quite good (Scanbrix, Polycam, Scaniverse, the new wave of scan-to-CAD tools that have been multiplying since the iPhone 17 Pro launch). But they're built for architects and contractors, not for warehouse managers. They give you a 3D model of a room, or a high-resolution mesh of an object, and then leave you to figure out what to do with it. None of them know that a 24U rolling rack is a thing, that an L-Acoustics K3 sub case has a standard footprint, or that your trailer floor is striped at 102 inches and anything wider than that has to come in on a B-side.

Cargo Measure isn't trying to be a general-purpose 3D scanner. It's trying to be the fastest possible path from 'this physical case exists in my warehouse' to 'this case is in my load plan with the right dimensions on the right truck.'

Why this matters for the load plan, not just the inventory

It would be tempting to think of Cargo Measure as an inventory app, a nicer way to populate a dimensions column in your rental software. That undersells it. The real payoff is downstream, in the load plan itself.

When the inputs to a 3D pack plan are accurate to a centimeter, the outputs stop being a 'best guess' and start being a working document the crew can build against. Truss can be pre-staged at the back of the trailer because the planner actually knows it'll fit through the door. Subwoofers can be tetris'd against the wheel wells because the planner knows the case is 38.5 inches deep, not 'about 38.' Pre-rig trucks can be planned tight enough to free up a half-trailer for the next leg's spare gear without crossing fingers. The number of last-minute load-out arguments drops because the people doing the loading and the people doing the planning are finally working off the same dataset.

That's the bigger picture we're building toward at Backline Logic: a workflow where the warehouse, the rental software, and the load plan are all talking to each other, and the source of truth is the physical gear itself rather than a dimensions column someone typed into a spreadsheet in 2019.

What's still in development

Cargo Measure is not shipping today. A few things we're still working through:

• Object segmentation on cluttered shelves. Single cases on the floor are easy. A row of stacked cases on a warehouse rack, with daylight from a roll-up door behind them, is harder. We're tuning the model to handle the messy real-world geometry of an actual gear cage.
• Soft cases and non-rectangular gear. Anvil cases scan beautifully. Cable trunks with side pockets, padded amp covers, and the occasional weirdly-shaped custom case need extra care so the bounding box doesn't grow to swallow the slack.
• Android. The first release will be iOS-only because that's where the LIDAR hardware is. We're watching the Android side of the market closely. Recent flagship phones from Samsung and Honor are starting to ship time-of-flight sensors that may or may not be usable for our purposes. We'll have more to say when we've put one through real testing.
• Direct integration with Flex Rental Solutions and Rentman. Truck Packer sync is the priority for launch, but a fair number of you have asked whether a fresh scan can also push dimensions back into your WMS. The answer is yes, eventually, and the integrations are being designed alongside the app.

If you'd like to be in the early-access cohort when we open it up, drop us a note from the contact page at backlinelogic.com and let us know what kind of inventory you're trying to wrangle. We're prioritizing teams who are running real productions, with real cases, in real warehouses, not because we don't love a lab test, but because the messy edge cases are where the app has to earn its keep.

The bigger thesis

Truck Packer started as a 3D load planner because that was the visible, painful problem in the room. The longer we've worked on it, the more obvious it's become that the load planner is only one stop along a longer pipeline. Cases get measured, gear gets pulled, trucks get packed, shows get loaded in, and at every step there's a handoff where data either flows cleanly or gets typed in by hand and corrupted along the way. The handoffs are where the time is lost, and they're where the next wave of tooling has to live.

Phone LIDAR is one of those rare cases where the right sensor showed up in the right place, in everyone's pocket, and is now finally accurate enough to do real work. Cargo Measure is our bet on what happens when you point that sensor at the most expensive, hardest-to-track inventory in your building and ask it to do the boring part of the job. We're excited about where it's going. We'll have more to share soon.